Two stories came up in my newsfeed that stand out.
"Patients will be able to use NHS app to opt for private hospital care to help waiting lists"
What an absolute scam, this is purely to get the numbers down. Given a choice of waiting 2 years on the NHS or 6 weeks on the private option, it's a no brainer for the patient. For the government - waiting list reduced, money to private sector and for the NHS less in the pot, that could have been used to reduce waiting lists.
"Houses of Parliament Crumbling"
Apparently MPs are having to put up with, blocked and overflowing toilets, unsafe electrics, substandard plumbing, lack of facilities, crumbling plaster, rats in corridors (4 legged variety), workspaces not fit for purpose and constant disruption because of building work.
Yet again they are out of touch with the real world. This is normal for many hospitals through the country. Yet £2m a WEEK is being poured in just to maintain the building. This isn't even the budget for the full refurbishment. That's estimated at £14bn, think about HS2 and Crossrail and how they rocketed.
Amazing how funds are found for certain projects and yet £10bn to get on top of NHS buildings?
May 22, 2023·edited May 22, 2023Liked by Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙
This is just another strand of the long-standing Tory gaslighting about the NHS - the only goal they actually have is to terminate, as far as they can, all publicly-funded health services and transfer its user base, (us, the public), as a captive client list, to their (largely USA corporates) private healthcare cronies and leave us to bear the cost of healthcare behind a smokescreen of private insurance, which, for all but the very wealthy, means no healthcare.
For them, the end-game is to stop the flow of public money to health and social services, and to divert that public money, as a continuous and immensely profitable revenue stream, both via private healthcare organisations and via other more crony-lucrative non-healthcare programmes and projects, like freeports, that ensure that that our wealth flows not to public services and infrastructure and the associated employment and public welfare and benefit, but to the private and untouchable offshore coffers of the very wealthy.
What is perhaps most worrying at present is that Starmer and his clique in the Labour party seem fairly determined to follow exactly the same path when they take power. I think we have to lose any illusion that Labour will protect the NHS while it is led by the Starmer faction and recognise that the same neoliberal economic ideologies and what is, in reality, fiscal deception that drive Tory economic ideology, also drive Starmer's thinking. There is nothing in the least bit socialist or Labour about his stated NHS approach.
We are not going to achieve the goal of preserving and repairing the NHS without also finding a way to stop the public finances being used as a plutocratic petty cash tin and that requires a major revision of economic policy and fiscal methodology, along the lines of that envisaged by Positive Money. (https://positivemoney.org/)
In the near term, our focus needs to be on reaching as much of the UK public, and particularly, at this point, the Labour voter base, with the message that the future of the NHS and of our public fiscal policy and methodology are inextricably linked and that the latter has to be fixed to enable the NHS to be saved and that the route that the Tories and Starmer's Labour are plotting will destroy the NHS.
The private healthcare sector will not rescue the NHS, or even ameliorate its current problems - it will make obscene profits whilst exacerbating the current problems and, given the opportunity, it will destroy the NHS as a public health service and turn it into a private profit centre, to the great detriment of the nation and each and every one of us.
As an aside, our greatest enemy in this is the mainstream press, who are complicit in maintaining and propagating the fiscal mythology that continuously gnaws away at our well-being and prosperity and serves only the media oligarchs that own the press. The days when the mainstream press was the voice of the public that shouted out to preserve the public interest are long gone - today's MSM is nothing other than the voice of the oligarchic propaganda machine.
You are too kind. Starmer, Streeting, and the Conservatives know privatization will simply funnel more public money into fewer and fewer wealthy hands, mostly American. Once out of politics they’ll be hired by these corporate bandits. So, privatization fixing NHS is not a myth, it’s a lie.
Yet another spot on analysis.
Two stories came up in my newsfeed that stand out.
"Patients will be able to use NHS app to opt for private hospital care to help waiting lists"
What an absolute scam, this is purely to get the numbers down. Given a choice of waiting 2 years on the NHS or 6 weeks on the private option, it's a no brainer for the patient. For the government - waiting list reduced, money to private sector and for the NHS less in the pot, that could have been used to reduce waiting lists.
"Houses of Parliament Crumbling"
Apparently MPs are having to put up with, blocked and overflowing toilets, unsafe electrics, substandard plumbing, lack of facilities, crumbling plaster, rats in corridors (4 legged variety), workspaces not fit for purpose and constant disruption because of building work.
Yet again they are out of touch with the real world. This is normal for many hospitals through the country. Yet £2m a WEEK is being poured in just to maintain the building. This isn't even the budget for the full refurbishment. That's estimated at £14bn, think about HS2 and Crossrail and how they rocketed.
Amazing how funds are found for certain projects and yet £10bn to get on top of NHS buildings?
This is just another strand of the long-standing Tory gaslighting about the NHS - the only goal they actually have is to terminate, as far as they can, all publicly-funded health services and transfer its user base, (us, the public), as a captive client list, to their (largely USA corporates) private healthcare cronies and leave us to bear the cost of healthcare behind a smokescreen of private insurance, which, for all but the very wealthy, means no healthcare.
For them, the end-game is to stop the flow of public money to health and social services, and to divert that public money, as a continuous and immensely profitable revenue stream, both via private healthcare organisations and via other more crony-lucrative non-healthcare programmes and projects, like freeports, that ensure that that our wealth flows not to public services and infrastructure and the associated employment and public welfare and benefit, but to the private and untouchable offshore coffers of the very wealthy.
What is perhaps most worrying at present is that Starmer and his clique in the Labour party seem fairly determined to follow exactly the same path when they take power. I think we have to lose any illusion that Labour will protect the NHS while it is led by the Starmer faction and recognise that the same neoliberal economic ideologies and what is, in reality, fiscal deception that drive Tory economic ideology, also drive Starmer's thinking. There is nothing in the least bit socialist or Labour about his stated NHS approach.
We are not going to achieve the goal of preserving and repairing the NHS without also finding a way to stop the public finances being used as a plutocratic petty cash tin and that requires a major revision of economic policy and fiscal methodology, along the lines of that envisaged by Positive Money. (https://positivemoney.org/)
In the near term, our focus needs to be on reaching as much of the UK public, and particularly, at this point, the Labour voter base, with the message that the future of the NHS and of our public fiscal policy and methodology are inextricably linked and that the latter has to be fixed to enable the NHS to be saved and that the route that the Tories and Starmer's Labour are plotting will destroy the NHS.
The private healthcare sector will not rescue the NHS, or even ameliorate its current problems - it will make obscene profits whilst exacerbating the current problems and, given the opportunity, it will destroy the NHS as a public health service and turn it into a private profit centre, to the great detriment of the nation and each and every one of us.
As an aside, our greatest enemy in this is the mainstream press, who are complicit in maintaining and propagating the fiscal mythology that continuously gnaws away at our well-being and prosperity and serves only the media oligarchs that own the press. The days when the mainstream press was the voice of the public that shouted out to preserve the public interest are long gone - today's MSM is nothing other than the voice of the oligarchic propaganda machine.
You are too kind. Starmer, Streeting, and the Conservatives know privatization will simply funnel more public money into fewer and fewer wealthy hands, mostly American. Once out of politics they’ll be hired by these corporate bandits. So, privatization fixing NHS is not a myth, it’s a lie.
Any private "help" will only drain the system as far as I can see. The ultimate aim being private care being the only option.