Butchery of the NHS @ No 10

Arturo is still recovering from watching the Olympics and the start of the Paralympics! He's in training for the Catalympics, he says!

As for me, I'm still monitoring the news, even though the corridors of power here in Downing Street are devoid of hide and hair belonging to 'Boy David' Cameron and 'Georgy' Osborne. However, their policies march on regardless.

For instance, the NHS is still in the process of being butchered, whether they are here or on the Costa Brava! On Monday, the Telegraph featured the headline:A global NHS? What a shameful idea: It is wrong-headed for NHS hospitals to market their skills internationally. The piece, written by Max Pemberton, critically analysed the idea that the NHS should be marketed abroad.

Pemberton wrote:

It is a recipe for disaster to expect hospitals to behave like fast-food chains or clothing stores. Hospitals should be focusing every shred of their attention on improving their services for patients, here, in this country. Hospitals are not businesses; they are places that are funded by us, for us, when we become unwell. The proposals miss the whole point of the NHS and what makes it a system for delivering healthcare worthy of attention.

Like the grubby men in string vests and gold sovereign rings who sit outside brothels beckoning gullible tourists, the Government is attempting to pimp out the NHS to foreigners by promising something that it cannot deliver. The NHS it is selling is a perverse pastiche of the NHS that we have in this country, stripped of the essence of what makes it valuable to us.

It’s not the NHS as a product that is revolutionary and worthy of export, it’s the NHS as a concept. The main appeal of the NHS to people around the world is the fact that it is a cheap, effective and equitable way of delivering healthcare. It is the notion of a system that is free at the point of delivery, regardless of ability to pay, that makes it valuable. The great irony of all this is that if we wanted to export the real ethos of the NHS, as opposed to what might be represented by some bland, meaningless logo, then we would be going around encouraging foreign governments to reject market principles and develop a socialised model of healthcare. And this isn’t going to happen.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9499177/A-global-NHS-What-a-shameful-idea.html

According to Arturo, the present Coalition really would like the NHS to 'behave like fast-food chains or clothing stores'. In fact, he says it's already happening and the Coalition are more than happy about it!

Also on Monday, Allyson Pollock writing in the Guardian stated:
NHS franchising: the toxic world of globalised healthcare is upon us: Staff wages and benefits eroded through privatisation is nothing compared to what is in store for patients

Ah ha! Now there's the rub! It isn't just the other countries who are going to 'pay through the nose' for the care - it's the poor suckers whose taxes have actually paid for the NHS, as well!

Allyson Pollock wrote:

Under the government's franchise plan for the NHS, shareholders and equity investors will use the service's logo as a Trojan horse to prise open the budgets of other countries' health systems and to front up their unethical, fraudulent and inequitable activities.

The article continued:

NHS hospitals and services are being sold off or incorporated; land and buildings are being turned over to bankers and equity investors. RBS, Assura, Serco and Carillion, to name but a few, are raking in billions in taxpayer funds for leasing out and part-operating PFI hospitals, community clinics and GP surgeries that we once owned.

Strangled by PFI debts and funding cuts, NHS foundation trusts compound their problems by entering into joint ventures. The great NHS divestiture, which began in 1990 with the introduction of the internal market and accelerated under the PFI programme, now takes the form of franchising, management buyout and corporate takeovers of our public hospitals. Virgin has been awarded £630m to provide services to vulnerable people and children in Surrey and Devon. Circle has been given the franchise for NHS hospital Hinchingbrooke and is now struggling to contain its debts. London teaching hospitals are merging to give them greater leverage for borrowing and cuts.

Can things get any worse? Well ... read on:

Loss of public control means higher cost and fewer services, as we have learned from the toxic record of the US corporations which are now part of England's new healthcare market and helped design it. Billing, invoicing, marketing and advertising will add between 30% and 50% to costs compared with 6% in the former NHS bureaucracy.

Patient charges will become commonplace. Fraudulent billing and embezzlement will become endemic. Take HCA, one of the largest and most profitable US chains and controlled by private equity firms including Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. In 2006 HCA International described its first joint venture with the NHS, the PFI University College London Hospital (UCLH), as "the establishment of Harley Street at UCLH".

HCA-UCLH provides cancer treatment to those who can pay from the 15th floor of the hospital. But currently some of HCA's American hospitals are under investigation for refusing care and performing unnecessary investigations and treatment, including cardiac surgery.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/27/nhs-privatisation-toxic-world-healthcare

So, I'd suggest one of two things to anyone in the UK reading this:
1. Don't get sick!
2. Start saving your pennies in a contingency piggy-bank!

'Boy David' Cameron and his smart-arsed sidekick 'Georgy' Osborne maybe out-of-town but their policies are rolling on. As Arturo said:
Here at No 10 and No 11 there's a massacre of the NHS taking place and it's worthy of Custer's Last Stand!
Arturo and I are so glad we're cats! We still have the RSPCA and the PDSA to pick up the pieces when one of our nine lives goes down the plughole!

'Bye'