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tweetingukpolitics · 4 months
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NHS waiting lists drive more Britons to pay for medical treatment | NHS | The Guardian
This is how NHS privatisation happens. It's not one fell swoop, the Tories don't wake up tomorrow and say "we're abolishing the NHS".
There's a slow chip at services, meaning more people pay to go private. Failing services get sold off to private enterprise. Decisions are made ever more on cost, not quality of care, so more people go private. The NHS is underfunded, so waiting lists grow longer and longer - so people who couldn't afford it before scrape together what they have, take out loans, go private. People hear about this and take out private health insurance because they're scared.
Slowly, it might become a bit like dentists, where actually you can't see an NHS one for love nor money, and if you can't go private you can only access emergency treatment.
Except accessing that treatment becomes difficult and slow and maybe that gets contracted out to private providers. Maybe then, the NHS dies a final death, or maybe they don't bother.
The point is, if the government get their way, the NHS will face a slow death of a thousand cuts over the next 10 years or so. And some people will become very rich indeed off the back of it.
And don't think labour will save you. Starmer is also in the pocket of private healthcare.
If you want the NHS to survive, if you want things to get better, not worse, now is the time to start fighting.
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loquaciousferret · 11 months
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people from the uk:
does it cost money at ur doctors practice to have a GP give you a doctors note or sickline for stress?? I’ve been told I have to pay for them to give me one. how is that ok?
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eaglesnick · 1 year
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101 Things You Should Know About the UK Tory Government
Thing 67
Jeremy Corbyn – yes, the man who would have comprehensively ruined our country had he ever been elected Prime Minister – recently wrote:
“How to destroy the NHS:
Step 1. Run it into the ground with austerity
Step 2.  Exploit the crisis to empower the private sector
Step 3   Abolish the principle of universal health care."  (Twitter: 03/01/2)
Ignoring the fact the Sun called Jeremy Corbyn "the most dangerous man to ever stand for high office in Britain” lets examine the evidence behind this hypothesis.
Step 1: Austerity.
“Even before the Covid-19 pandemic the NHS was facing a significant funding shortfall because of increasing demand for services and years of funding settlements that were both below the long-term average and excluded important areas of spending like long-term capital investment (including spending on buildings and equipment) and the education and training of clinical staff.
This was manifesting itself in rising pressures on services, workforce shortages and rising waiting times, with all areas of NHS care affected. A lack of capital investment has seen the NHS develop a maintenance backlog of £9.2 billion, which includes high risk and urgent repairs.”
(Kings Fund: NHS funding: our position. 19/05/22)
Step 2: Private sector.
“According to NHS accounts, the purchase of healthcare from independent sector providers rose from £9.69bn in 2019/20 to £12.17bn in 2020/21…
Yet research by the London School of Economics in 2019 estimated that rather than the widely reported 7%, the real figure was roughly 25%.
The research highlighted what it said were several flaws with the government’s methodologies, including a lack of clear definition for independent sector organisations. It also highlighted how funding from local authorities to the independent sector was excluded from the main figures, and how some major items of private sector expenditure were excluded from the government’s calculations.”  (Investment Monitor: 14/11/22)
Step 3: 3   Abolish the principle of universal health care. 
No politician has yet come forward to openly advocate the abolition of the principle of universal health care, free at the point of use. We will have to wait and see if Corbyn is the dangerous socialist portrayed by the right-wing press, or a man with more forward vision than all of the Tory Party put together.
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vamprisms · 9 months
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private medical care shouldn't exist. you shouldn't be able to pay to get better healthcare than others. poor people shouldn't have to die because their health isn't profitable. quality and consistent medical treatment should always be free
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Link
The private health sector in this country is tiny, employs virtually no doctors that don’t already work for the NHS, and has a miniscule number of beds. Rather than clearing the backlog, Labour’s plan would simply end up creating more chaos.
According to the British Medical Association (BMA) the current NHS crisis has three major causes: staff shortages, insufficient funding and backlogs caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. While the latter is beyond the immediate control of any government, the first two are the direct result of government failings over the past twelve years.
Conservatives will often argue that funding for the NHS has risen since 2010, and it has – but that is an inevitable consequence of monetary inflation and increases in population. Looking at health spending as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), we can see that funding slumped up until the Covid-19 pandemic forced a massive expansion.
Linked to this is the decline in staff, which can be measured by the number of vacancies. When it comes to nurses, for instance, vacancies had risen as high as 47,500 in September 2022 – an increase of nearly 10,500 (+28%) since September 2020.
When it comes to Labour’s plan of working with the private sector to reduce NHS waiting lists, the holes are numerous. Firstly, even if projections of treating over 200,000 more patients were realised, these numbers are merely a drop in the ocean. The waiting list for NHS treatment currently stands at 7.2 million, meaning that it would take over 30 years for Streeting’s plan to clear the treatment backlog – longer in practice, as the number of patients does not remain static. The reason for that is quite simple: because the NHS dominates the healthcare industry in Britain, the private healthcare sector is incredibly small. Unlike the United States and Germany – where 19% of hospital beds are owned by for-profit hospitals – a mere 5% of hospital beds in the UK are located in for-profit facilities. Even if this sector could work at far over its current capacity (which is what Streeting is demanding) it is too small to make much of a difference.
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Did you know?
The term 'Woke' literally means to be aware of social issues that need addressing.
So when conservatives are complaining about new "woke" people and politicians destroying the country, they're admitting that their own political parties aren't doing their own job.
By the definition of the word- it is _literally_ the job of a politician to be woke.
Good job guys, really showing your intellect and research capabilities, there aren't you?
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dkettchen · 2 years
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BDG: *includes a bit in his new video where a clearly french-stereotyped character w a french accent says “[they’re] british” to portray The Europeans™*
me, EU french-speaker, living in the UK: how dare you call me out specifically
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beneaththegildedmoon · 4 months
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Absolutely begging my otherwise sensible fellow leftists to stop dismissing anyone who engages with voting and elections as a Stupid Liberal. Voting for someone as a leftist doesn't mean I agree with them, it means I'd rather fight against their bullshit than the even worse bullshit of whoever the other options are. It's a harm reduction tactic to avoid making our own fight harder than it needs to be.
Refusing to vote for "the lesser evil" because of your own reactionary purity politics actively erodes what remains of a political left wing while allowing even greater harm to come to those most vulnerable in our society. Refusing to acknowledge there are objective and concrete differences between political parties and dubbing them "all as bad as each other" actively ignores the direct and immediate danger specific policy differences can have for poc, trans people, disabled people, poor people, homeless people, and otherwise marginalised folks.
Electoral politics is not the battleground where we will win the fight against capitalist oppression, but the people are also not about to pick up their pitchforks and storm parliament tomorrow. This fight will take years if not decades, and I would rather spend that time fighting progressives and liberals than conservatives and right-wingers.
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tweetingukpolitics · 2 years
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EveryDoctor's map of NHS privatisation
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Private health firms have donated more than £800,000 to the Conservative Party over the past ten years, openDemocracy can reveal.
This includes companies run by wealthy tycoons who have wined and dined former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Theresa May and other senior ministers.
The finding comes as the government hands out more NHS contracts to the private sector in a bid to tackle the backlog in the health service.
The British Medical Association has warned that relying on the private sector threatens the "sustainability of the NHS”, which has suffered from “a decade of underinvestment”.
Health profits
The Conservative Friends of the NHS is a group of Tory-voting doctors and health professionals who claim to support the NHS. The group’s president is health minister Maria Caufield and it has hosted stalls at the Conservative Party’s annual conference.
But the organisation’s chairman and founder, Dr Ashraf Chohan, has not worked for the NHS for 23 years, according to his LinkedIn profile, and himself has a private GP and private health insurance.
Chohan is a private health tycoon who set up a portfolio of medical and nursing businesses in London. One of his firms, West End Medical Practice Limited, has donated more than £198,000 to the Tories since 2019 – making it one of the sector’s biggest political donors.
As chair of the Conservative Friends of the NHS, Chohan has met with senior politicians, including Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Nadhim Zahawi. Before Christmas, in the midst of the ongoing NHS crisis, he also attended a “meaningful” meeting at Number 10.
Despite the group’s claim to support the NHS, it has repeatedly championed a two-tier health system on Twitter, saying the private sector “should be applauded for reducing demand for the NHS”. In other tweets it has advocated health insurance and argued that “all high taxpayers must have [private health] insurance by 2025”.
Experts say reliance on private health firms is creating a system in which poorer people who cannot afford to go private are “left to put up or shut up”.
NHS outsourcing to the private sector has also been linked to higher mortality rates. And hospitals that use private cleaning companies have been linked with higher rates of the MRSA superbug.
During the pandemic, Chohan – who previously donated to Labour before switching – came under scrutiny over two private firms he ran with his son that sold Covid tests. Reports said customers were charged between £80-£200 for the PCR tests, but many complained about lost samples and refused refunds.
Another Conservative Party donor is Genix Healthcare Ltd, which is part of a group of private dental clinics that makes the “majority” of its £6.6m income from NHS contracts.
The company was set up in response to the “severe shortage of NHS dentists” and says it aims to become the “dental corporate of choice for the NHS”.
Genix Healthcare has bankrolled the Tories with donations worth more than £158,000 since 2015, including cash and sponsorships.
Its owner, Mustafa Mohammed, who has posed for photos with Johnson and May and boasted about owning a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes S-Class, has also given almost £225,000 of his own money to the party.
This includes a £20,000 donation to Jeremy Hunt in 2019, the year after he resigned as health secretary.
As one of the party’s top donors, Mohammed has been part of an elite Tory dining club called the Leader’s Group, which enjoys regular access to the prime minister and senior government figures.
Care homes and GPs
The majority of Tory donations from the private health sector have come since the pandemic began in 2020.
One such donor, Doctor Care Anywhere Group PLC, has given the party more than £37,000 in the past two years – and reportedly spent £1,000 on a ticket for government minister Paul Scully to watch a cricket match at Lord’s.....
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eaglesnick · 9 months
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No Society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable” Adam Smith
The Metro had this headline yesterday.
"Rishi Sunak is demanding “restraint “ on pay - what a joke.” (Metro: (13/07/23)
The Metro goes on to point out that although pay may be going up, people are becoming poorer, especially those that work in the public sector, because inflation is far outstripping pay awards.
“Pay may be going up, but people are undeniably getting poorer. They’re feeling financially hopeless and helpless. Yet now, the Government and the Bank of England are joining forces to imply it’s all your fault for daring to ask for higher pay in the middle of a cost of living scandal."  (Metro: 13/07/23)
Multi-millionaire Sunak could of course, have followed the Metro's demand that he tax the rich a little more to help restore public sector pay and to encourage recruitment and retention within our public services. But Sunak is not going to increase taxes on the rich. After all, why would he when he and his wife are members of the Times Rich List with a combined wealth of £529million?
Sunak, for the tax year 2021/22, paid only 22% tax on a total income of £1.9million.  If you or I had earned that amount of money we would have been paying a tax rate of 45% on earned income over £150,000. The reason Sunak and his fellow multi-millionaire friends do not pay that higher tax rate is because much of their money comes from UNEARNED income: unearned income in the form of capital gains is only taxed at 20% no matter how many millions that happens to be.
 “The super-rich pay lower taxes than you …because the forms of income they often rely on are taxed much lower than the income of a typical person who has to rely on a salary.” (views-voices.Oxfam.ork.uk: 18/01/23)
Some will argue that calls to tax the rich fairly are merely the politics of envy. I would argue it’s more a question of morality than envy but lets leave that discussion aside for now. Lets look at Sunak’s claim that public sector pay rises are inflationary and that is why they have to be restrained.
“Rishi Sunak has said he would make the "responsible" decision on pay increases for public sector workers, in order to control inflation.”  (BBC News: 26/06/23)
Commentating on a £5billion increase in public sector pay, the financial journalist Andy Verity said on BBC news yesterday:
“£5billion pounds may sound a lot but, when the total spending in the economy is expected to be £2,200billion this year, it amounts to an increment of barely a fifth of one percentage point” (Andy Verity: BBC News:13/07/23)
Many economists dismiss the idea that public sector pay rises  add to inflation' as the public sector does not increases charges to reflect higher staff pay as happens in the private sector. But lets leave that argument aside as well. If a pay rise to match inflation was given for ALL public sector then economists estimate this would cost the Treasury an additional £23.5billion.
However, if you take into account what the government has already agreed to pay, and then also take into account the 30% in higher taxes and VAT receipts the government will claw back, then the total bill is below £10 billion. (Phillip Inman, Observer: 11/12/22)
This figure is twice the cost talked about by Andy Verity but it still only amounts to  TWO FIFTHS of a percentage point of total UK spending.
The sad truth is we are governed by a rich elite who put their own wealth and well-being before that of ordinary working people. For Sunak and his friends, the public sector is seen as a missed opportunity for them to make even more money than they already possess. The NHS in particular holds the potential for some individuals to make billions but first they will have to privatise it. What better way to do that than to starve it of funds, underpay and undermine its workforce, and run it into the ground.
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sadlazzle · 1 year
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part of a functioning healthcare system is educating ppl on the basic layout of their bodies so they don’t end up going to the doctors for a mildly upset tummy
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