'No NHS in England from 2013'. Is there anything we can do to save it?

[Solopower]

'In 2012, parliament in England passed a law effectively ending the NHS by abolishing the 60-year duty on the government to secure and provide healthcare for all. From 2013, there will be no National Health Service in England, and tax funding will increasingly flow to global healthcare corporations. In contrast, Scotland and Wales will continue to have a publicly accountable national health service.

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.'

Allyson Pollock in The Guardian.

Well I'm scared. Life is going to get so much harder for the vast majority of us. I'm grateful to people like Pollock and Dr Mark Porter for trying to alert us to what is happening, but what can we do about it?

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

"maternity care is very costly" - that's nonsense. I had my DS1 by planned caesaerian as he was breech. That whole operation (including 2 doctors, an anaethetist, a paediatrician, 2 midwives and a theatre nurse) plus a 5 night stay in a single room in hospital cost a little over ?7000. If you have a straightforward birth and a short hospital stay it costs a couple of thousand euro.

Solopower

Amyboo, the health service you are describing is the health service I recognise as being the one I have always used in the UK. Same day appointments, no long waits, excellent treatment, excellent care ... Only I never had to pay for it (except with my taxes).

However, I understand this is not the experience of everyone here.

I don't want to go through my family's list of NHS failures, but suffice it to say that my experience is diametrically opposite to yours.

The problems get a lot of publicity, and the NHS is being deprived of funds, so it's very likely to get worse.

The NHS isn't being deprived of funds. Its budget has not fallen under the coalition government. Cameron promised to keep NHS funding at the same level Labour would, and he has. I think he was wrong, but that was his promise, ridiculous though it is.

But we had a wonderful system that I used to boast about to my friends from overseas. Built on the soundest of principles: that those who are lucky enough to be healthy and well and can work for a living, pay for those who are vulnerable and ill. What on earth is wrong with that?? Especially when we will all be old one day, we hope.

Oh, the principle is laudable. The reality - of a monolithic system controlled from Whitehall which is cumbersome, unresponsive and bureaucratic - is the problem. The problem was always the nationalisation and centralisation of healthcare in the UK. Taking over all those town and county-run facilities and suborning in them in to a single structure was a recipe for disaster. For some bizarre reason that I still can't fathom, the 1945 government decided that the best design of healthcare system they could copy was the one from Stalinist Russia.

Feeling huge relief that I live in Scotland! That's horrendous for everyone down south :(

flatpack - NHS funding is not keeping pace with rising costs, largely because we are in an ageing society but also to do with the expense of new drugs and new technologies. A flat budget when costs are rising IS a cut and does mean there isn't enough money to go round. And actually the government is cutting anyway - insisting the NHS has to save £20bn over three years.

And it's just Tory propaganda to say the health service is 'monolithic'. In fact, it's a series of small organisations - doctors' surgeries, outpatient clinics, community services, local hospitals and a few larger ones, the big teaching hospitals. And lots of fat cat unnecessary bureaucracy caused by Tory (and new Labour) insistence on the 'market', such as Monitor (the 'economic regulator'), the CQC, the NHS Commissioning Board, GP commissioning groups and so on ad infinitum.

Can I point out that, while I am concerned by the future fragment ideation of the NHS, the thing that someone else mentioned upthread of a locally run HS deciding not to fund, say, cancer treatment, already happens - though not with things as high profile as cancer treatment.

For the last 6 years, my PCT has not had a Neurologist. If you needed to see one, the PCT sent you to a PCT 60 miles away. You are allowed to go once a year, even if that Neuro wants to see you again in 3 or 6 months time.

If you have a 'Cinderella' illness, then local PCT's rationing treatment, and deciding that your illness isn't a priority has been going on for longer than just the Coalition. That process was started by Labour, and is being continued by the Conservatives and Lib Dem.

I may be a leftie at heart, but in this issue, they started this process, and the Coalition has taken that idea and run with it.

All I want is to know that I will be able to go to A&E if I injure myself when having a seizure. That I can go and see the GP for follow up treatment. That I can regularly see a Neurologist. That I can continue to have an annual MRI scan, and EEG's whenever my seizure rate changes. That I can continue taking the epilepsy meds that I am on, that might be bloody expensive for the NHS, but give me the best seizure control/adverse side effects balance, without me being severely allergic to them, having them cause me early liver failure, having no seizure control whatsoever, and losing my peripheral vision (permanently) on them.

I want to do this without being forced to pay for insurance that A) I can't afford due to being disabled, and B) will be excluded from cover because it is a pre-existing condition.

I want to do this without a personal health vouchers booklet that will run out after 4 months because the only suitable med for MY epilepsy is incredibly expensive. Because then I would be 8 months of the year without any seizure control, and in almost permanent Status Epilepticus - well, I wouldn't, because without emergency treatment that I wouldn't have vouchers to pay for, I'd be dead.

I want the NHS to be run MORE Nationally, with every PCT being FORCED to either provide every service, or being forced to pay both the PCT that does for that service AND the patient and Carers travelling costs if it is out of PCT. (This already seems to be vanishing.)

A PCT (or an even more 'locally run' health service) shouldn't be allowed to decide that because only twenty people in their town have diabetes that they won't provide any diabetes services. Or because cancer is a higher priority, they won't hire a Neurologist to replace the one they sacked. For 7 YEARS. With no plans to ever do so. Meanwhile, a complete rebuild of a perfectly functional hospital is ongoing, including opening a brand new oncology department. Costing £3.5m. And a brand new medical centre with A&E Dept in an outlying town is only staffed 9-5 Mon-Fri. People regularly die from heart attacks in that town as it is a 30 mile journey to A&E outside of office hours. It was meant to be a 24 hr A&E. But isn't because they can't afford to staff it.

edam

flatpack - NHS funding is not keeping pace with rising costs, largely because we are in an ageing society but also to do with the expense of new drugs and new technologies.

But it isn't having its budget cut.

A flat budget when costs are rising IS a cut and does mean there isn't enough money to go round.

No it isn't.

And actually the government is cutting anyway - insisting the NHS has to save £20bn over three years.

Which isn't a budget cut.

And it's just Tory propaganda to say the health service is 'monolithic'. In fact, it's a series of small organisations - doctors' surgeries, outpatient clinics, community services, local hospitals and a few larger ones, the big teaching hospitals.

The NHS is a single organisation run centrally from Whitehall.

And lots of fat cat unnecessary bureaucracy caused by Tory (and new Labour) insistence on the 'market', such as Monitor (the 'economic regulator'), the CQC, the NHS Commissioning Board, GP commissioning groups and so on ad infinitum.

Yes, of course, because businesses are well known for their desire to have massive bureaucracies, unlike the slender, efficient public sector.

flatpack, you are entitled to think whatever you think, but please don't fib about the facts. The fact is the government's health policy has introduced a huge new bureaucracy. They are responsible for adding bureaucracy, some of which I listed below. That is a fact.

And the private sector isn't always slim or efficient - again, that's claim not a fact. Look at Group 4. Not terribly efficient at fulfilling their contract to provide Olympic security, were they? No, we had to fall back on the poor bloody public sector, those dedicated people who always have to pick up the slack when the private sector stuffs up. Look at PFI contracts in the NHS - imposed by people who believed the private sector was efficient, in fact hugely expensive and forcing some hospitals into bankruptcy.