Press release, SOS NHS

PRESS RELEASE            SOSNHS
BREAKING THE NHS –
STEALING ENGLAND’s HEALTH THROUGH RECKLESS REFORMS
Despite requests to release the detail of the Health & Social Care Reform
Risk Assessment from every corner – including the Information
Commissioner, Andrew Lansley continues to plough through his changes
without an electoral mandate and to withhold this vital detail.
William Beveridge – founding father of the NHS :
‘The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or
of races, but the happiness of the common man ………Want is one only of
five giants on the road of reconstruction; the others are Disease,
Ignorance, Squalor,  and Idleness ’
The Health & Social Care Bill 2011 will knowingly return these Five Giants
to the people of England – which is immoral.
The attached critical mass report BREAKING THE NHS – Stealing
England’s Health through reckless reforms brings together a
multitude of informed voices, clearly stating that these reforms are a
risk of unique proportions – and that the Bill should be dropped at the
earliest opportunity, whilst it is not too late to rescue the NHS from
oblivion and return to a focus on maintaining and improving standards.
We have an excessively costly and wasteful exercise, based upon absolutely no
evidence, at a time when every pound counts. It is a threat to professional
standards and quality care and will herald a profit-focused approach which will also
result in EU Competition Law costing the service millions of pounds in law suits
from a dissatisfied private sector. Far from improving patient chances, if
implemented, the Health & Social Care Bill 2011 will result in increasing numbers of
patients fighting to obtain treatment and care.

Baroness Glenys Thornton says
“This is an important and well researched source of information about how damaging
the Health & Social Care Bill will be for our NHS.
Anyone seeking information about the concerns over the Bill will find this report of
great value.”
The government protests that it is too late to reverse the process – but withdrawal
of the Bill will prevent the full scale destruction of the NHS and the full impact of
marketisation.  However research now shows that immediate cessation of the will
save at least £1 billion and put a stop to the most dangerous elements of these
reforms.   It is therefore not too late!
We encourage everyone who cares about the NHS to sign the petitions and to use
this report as a means of showing the huge threat to England’s wellbeing which
comes with this dreadful Bill.
Dr Kailash Chand O.B.E.    http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22670

For press enquiries re BREAKING THE NHS please contact :
SOSNHS press office      07516 183137
Dr Brian Fisher                                        07949  595349

Read the full report

Labour pledges to repeal NHS bill

A piece of good news after the years of damage done under New Labour.  Burnham was one of only 2 decent Labour Health Secretaries (the other was Dobson).

“Andy Burnham has shown his true colours. He wants to turn the clock back to 1948, destroying the progress that was made under Tony Blair …” said a source close to Lucifer. “He’s rolling back the progress of the New Labour years by taking us back to a top-down, command and control NHS.”   Well yes.

But the struggle goes on – this blog has been quiet for a while but there is plenty of campaigning going on – see links.

Private company pulls out of NHS contract | Share on LinkedIn

Private company pulls out of NHS contract | Share on LinkedIn.

Our NHS: efficient and free- a heresy which the market fundamentalists must destroy

Noah Tucker on the 21st Century Socialism site

In attempting to gain support for their ‘reforms’ of the NHS (ie, the further marketisation, privatisation and fragmentation of the health system in England) it would be political suicide for the Conservative-Liberal government to refer to the USA as the example to follow. In the United States, where the market and the private sector is the most dominant among the world’s wealthy countries, not only are population health outcomes among the worst, but the system is by far the most inefficient and expensive, costing an astonishing 17.3% of US gross domestic product. So instead, David Cameron and his allies have been comparing Britain’s mainly publicly-owned health system adversely to those of the other European Union states, singling out France in particular……..

read article

Shock therapy for the NHS | Russell Razzaque | Independent Eagle Eye Blogs

Shock therapy for the NHS | Russell Razzaque | Independent Eagle Eye Blogs.

Excellent analysis (strangely from the Independent home of  economic and social liberalism – but let the contradictions roam) of the way the coup regime is approaching its job of getting maximum capital accumulation from the NHS.  Basically argues that it is using the Chicago Boys’ shock tactics to create chaos – see Naomi Klein’s book on Disaster Capitalism (The Shock Doctrine)  for many more examples of this approach.

The risks of the NHS ‘reforms’ – 2 labourist analyses and a comment

From the SHA:

The risks of the coup regime’s NHS ‘reform’:

Risk 1: Privatisation of commissioning and privatisation of services

Risk 2: Ministers assuming power without responsibility

Risk 3: Massive centralisation of power and control

Oh and that’s about it……???

but read the full article…..

and from UNISON (these headings from second reading parliamentary briefing – not yet posted on site)

1.  THE NEW NHS: AN UNFETTERED COMPETITIVE FREE-FOR-ALL

2.  PRICE OVER QUALITY

3.  PRIVATE PATIENTS PRIORITISED

4.  MASSIVE INSTABILITY

5.  LACK OF DEMOCRATIC ENGAGEMENT AND TRANSPARENCY

6.  NHS STAFFING ISSUES

7.   TRANSFER OF REGULATION OF SOCIAL WORKERS

Well here at the DHRSA commisariat we think the main problem is that the ‘reforms’ clear the ground for unfettered capital accumulation.  This is the new enclosure of the commons.  Profit before need, trampled worker rights, lack of democracy – they all follow from this.  But the trade union/labourist leviathan has always resisted proper analysis of capitalism which we see here in its crisis like a wounded animal thrashing around and destroying whatever people’s good is in its path.

Social Work Action Network Annual Conference

Birmingham

15^th & 16^th April 2011

Building Alliances, Defending Services

Conference website

Booking details

The theme of the conference will be building alliances in the struggle to defend services and challenge austerity measures. The conference will bring together social work practitioners, service users, students and educators to share experiences and further develop our networks of resistance.

 

Sessions include:

Challenging Cameron’s Big Society and fighting welfare cuts

Building alliances defending services – a session led by young people

Social work and resistance across the globe

Workshops on:

Radical social work, challenging racism and oppression and other related topics

No democratic mandate

There is no democratic mandate for the unprecedented changes to marketise the NHS and turn health care, health and illness into commodities.

More, this government is actually a coup regime.  A popular majority voted against the Tories, thinking that the Liberals were also custodians of progressive social values.   Instead we got a fundamentalist neo-con regime that is attacking working people and their achievements, attacking the vulnerable and turning the commons into private property.  On the NHS there was a promise of no reorganisation.  The extent of this coup is becoming more and more apparent by the day – its only saving grace being the politicisation of many in response to the onslaught.  Even those who voted for the Tories will have believed this, thinking maybe that they were voting for an end to political interference in the NHS.

To see what a number of organisations have said about the NHS White Paper follow this link.

The axeing of NICE confirms in whose interests this government is working.

In this Guardian piece, Polly Toynbee makes a fair analysis of what the ToryLiberals are doing.  As she points out, health care is always rationed – it is just that it makes more sense to do it in an organised basis, using best evidence on effectiveness and cost.   NICE has got a few things wrong – indeed its canonisation of randomised control trial black box methodology has been overdone.  But the important thing is to look at what is going on here.   The drug companies welcomed the removal of NICE’s powers to approve and disapprove treatments – why?  Obvious, they stand to make more profit – which will be at the expense of other health care budget lines.

So why is Lansley doing it?  To protect clinical discretion and patient choice?   No – because Lansley has a job to do.   His job is to facilitate the accumulation of capital wherever he can. He’ll also do that through privatisation (in a variety of forms – just wait and see), through driving down wages, through bringing in more co-payments, through opening up new markets for private capital, through cutting out areas of expenditure that don’t produce a profit for capital – and finding ways in which it might (story of education and training).

But Polly doesn’t quite say this – a pity really because she paints Lansley as irrational – when he is extremely cunningly rational.  Like I say, he has a job to do.

Forget patients. Andrew Lansley is the servant of big pharma

21st Century Socialism and Health

Here is a discussion paper on the meaning of socialism and its implications for the NHS.

It responds to a relative lack of clarity on the left about the alternative that should be proposed to the current market orthodoxy.  It makes a distinction between the definition of socialism (rule by and for people rather than by and for capital) and the puzzle of how a socialist society could be coordinated.  It argues that the answer lies in a democratic, participative approach to allocation and coordination that is distinct from statism, market socialism and cooperativism.  Some implications for NHS reform are also explored.

Read the article

DHRSA has published this article with the permission of the author, under a creative commons licence, respecting the freedom to publish it elsewhere.

 

New position statement on markets and health from SHA

Good to see this statement:

http://www.sochealth.co.uk/Policy/marketisation.html

 

 

The NHS is relatively efficient, even after the dose of neoliberalism

Interesting data from the Commonwealth Fund (despite its name this is a US based outfit).