In a weird, parallel world, at least a billion light years from the one in which you will find me, lives a man called Prof Stephen Smith, who used to be chair of East Kent acute hospital trust. Prof Smith is part of a thinktank called Radix UK, whose trustees include ex-Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley and the Labour MP Stephen Kinnock. He’s written a book in which he suggests the best way of funding the NHS is to charge people for using it, you know, the exact opposite of why the 1945 Labour government set it up in the first place. This is what he wants to do:
- Charge sick people £8 a day when they are in hospital
- Charge people up to £8 for medical appliances
- End free prescriptions for over 60s
- Fine people who miss medical appointments
- Cut tax for people who take out private medical insurance
Two things here:
- This is the thin end of the wedge
- Fuck off
Prof Smith will protect the poor by means testing everything. Means testing is a colossally expensive and bureaucratic way of doing anything. You’d need another small army of officials to administer this new scheme. Presumably, if you are wheeled into your local hospital with a heart attack, stroke or cancer, the first thing you will need to do is get your credit card out. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” “Yes, I understand that. But can you just put your PIN in this little machine?”
“I think the public would be prepared to pay some additional charges,” the Prof adds. No, I fucking wouldn’t. Here’s why:
We get treatment from OUR NHS when we are ill. This is not America. When we get admitted, the only thing that matters is NHS staff strive to make us better. We don’t need to run up debts, sell our valuables, even our houses, to make medical vultures get rich from us. No. This is a principle which is non-negotiable. In the view of this blogger, if you can afford private medical insurance, you should be taxed a lot more. Because if you take it out, you are not relieving pressure on the NHS: you do because you’re all right Jack and Jacqueline.
Stephen Kinnock, who is a Labour MP – A LABOUR MP – needs to explain what the actual fuck he is doing working with the dodgy Prof. It may be that the Prof has wandered off message and is acting purely on his own don’t-give-a-toss ‘principles’. Either way, Stephen needs to tell us. His dad was the second most important political figure in my life – obviously the sainted Tony was first – so I think we should be told.
Charging for using the NHS is the beginning of the end. We should be looking to scrap charges like prescriptions, as they have in Wales and Scotland, not bring in new ones. If we don’t fight this, the private health parasites will be rubbing their hands together. If you think making money from sick people is a good thing, you’re no friend of mine.
