How to destroy the NHS: A step by step guide

February 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

From Stephen Law

Suppose I am very very rich, and very very selfish. The NHS annoys me intensely. It costs lots in tax revenue to run, and being very rich, I pay proportionately more of my income on it, and of course far more in terms of hard cash, then almost anyone else. I also resent the fact that my business empire is unable to cash in on providing the services that people would buy from my private businesses if the NHS was not there.

BUT, the public loves the NHS, even many Tories are fond of it, and to propose scrapping it would provoke howls of outrage. Plus there’s no evidence I can marshal that the public would get a better service if it were provided by the private sector – rather the opposite in fact.

What would I do? Here’s what I would do.

First, I’d ensure a team of expert PR run the Tory party – people adept at twisting facts, spinning, and indeed telling bare face lies and getting away with it. And I’d have my private health companies etc. fund them generously.

Next, once elected, I’d get them to introduce phase one: the introduction of a market system in which GP’s buy services from NHS hospitals, or anyone else, based on variable price, etc. This can still be called “NHS” because it’s still free at the point of use. This would all be justified by lies about how the evidence shows it’s more efficient, etc.

Read the rest.

Free at the point of use

February 11th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

Here we fucking go

Drunk people should pay for the treatment they receive at accident and emergency units, a patient’s group has said.

Oh, just fuck off with that shit.

Margaret Watt, chair of the [Scotland Patients Association], said she would be raising the issue with Scotland’s health secretary.

Ms Watt said: “Anyone who has been abusing alcohol and can’t stand on their feet and is admitted to hospital at the weekend should pay towards their treatment.

“Staff are used and abused by these people.”

Watt is conflating two issues here: 1) abuse of staff and 2) self-inflicted fucking up.

Staff also get abused by sober people when they’ve been waiting for fucking hours in A&E. People turn up at weekend unable to stand on their own two feet for a whole host of reasons, many because they’re twats and hurt themselves.

What about a drunk person that didn’t mean to get fucking leathered and had their drink spiked? Should they be charged? What about the rock climber that fell off a cliff because the hand hold was not as strong as they thought.

People that abuse staff should have their treatment refused or arrested or both.

Either everyone that ends up breaking their body due to their own stupidity has to pay for the services they receive or no one does.

What’s the difference between someone that’s drunk so much they’re livers packed in before they’ve got to the hospital and the IY enthusiast that stuck a drill through the middle of their hand (that was an interesting experience, I can tell you)?

Absolutely nothing. The means may be different but the end result is the same.

We all pay for the NHS and services it provides through our taxes. If I’ve gotta pay for treatment every time I need it, and pretty much everytime I need is is my own fault, I would opt out of the paying those taxes and spend it on private health care. It is a selfish thing. I’m not paying towards the health service to provide health care to some other fucker, I (happily) pay so it’s there when I need it. I shouldn’t have to pay fucking twice.

The way the Tories are taking it, Ms Watt will get her wish. Along with having to pay for treatments for stuff that isn’t self-inflicted.

The Scottish government said alcohol misuse cost Scotland £3.56bn a year – about £900 for every adult.

When asked about the issue of charging for drunk patients for emergency treatment, Ms Sturgeon said: “Not only does alcohol misuse burden health service and police – and the healthcare costs alone are around £267m annually – but it also leaves families devastated by the death and illness caused by alcohol.

So what if aclohol abuse costs Scotland £900 per adult per year. Charging to use the hospital isn’t going to fucking help. You won’t get peole to stop drinking themselves to oblivion because “ooh, I’d better not. I can’t afford a stomach pump this week.” It’d probably cost more to get payment out of people than the treatment itself.

Traffic accidents leave families devasted. Are you gonna start charging them as well?

Well, if somehow this is introduced, I expect a little leaflet through my door with the scale of charges. Just so I know how much every little accident or drink is going to cost me.

Nurses don’t need incentives, apparently

July 18th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink

I’m terribly sorry, but here’s another post about a Daily Mail story.

Nurses are being given spa breaks, casino gambling lessons and cocktail-making master classes simply for turning up to work.

As usual it’s not quite as simple as that and the Mail debunks it own story in the next few paragraphs.

The Department of Health agency NHS Professionals, which supplies shift workers to about 80 NHS trusts, is giving away these and other activity breaks to encourage nurses to sign up for work and attend.

But the taxpayer-funded scheme has attracted criticism at a time when the public sector faces savage cuts.

Nurses aren’t being given freebies just for turning up for work, that would be ridiculous. In case you didn’t know, NHS Professionals is an employment agency. It supplies nurses, doctors and admin personnel to the healthcare ‘industry’.

These freebies aren’t being given away to every nurse. The nurse has to sign up to, and actually do, 10 shifts a month goes into a prize draw. Nurses aren’t given casino classes “simply for turning up to work”. These are incentives to get nurses to want to do shifts, with an obligation to fulfil before one is elligible to be considered for the prize draw. It’s not like the nurse is contracted to do the hours and they’re being given this offer, NHS Professionals are trying to get staff in to fill empty shifts.

Nadine Dorries, being the only ex-nurse rent-a-quote in the commons worth speaking to, chips in with…

To offer incentives when we should be watching every penny is madness. Just give the nurses a decent wage.

Which is saying stop spending money on nurses and spend more money on nurses.

The thing that Nadine, and to be honest most of the comments below, seem to miss is that this is to get nurses doing shifts that they don’t have to do.

Looks like mission accomplished for this article then.

Apparently, the USA isn’t a democracy

August 13th, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

This comment is from a Fox News article about the Republican lies about the NHS* (my emphasis)…

by wantmytaxesback Texas

The NHS was conceptualized during WW2. At that point, EVERYTHING was rationed. Food, anemeties…lets not forget that they were getting bombed by the Luftwaffe. I know most liberals are too young to know what WW2 was even about, but that’s ok. You have the internet to educate you. I suggest you do it. Now. There are so many employees of the NHS now that it is near impossible to get rid of. It is a fact of life in Britain. Its unfortunate, really. However, we cannot let that happen in America. We are a Republic, not a democracy. Mob rule does not, and never will, work

You fucking thick twat. Fucking rednecks.

*If you don’t know it read the article itself

TPA: Transparency Please, Arseholes

August 5th, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

The Taxpayers Alliance…

The Gazette: Doctor is earning more than £380,000 a year

FACT!!1!!one!l!
Doctor fucking-is-earning a fucking fat wodge of dosh! That’s what ot says isn’t it?

It was revealed yesterday that a GP in the NHS North East Essex area, which covers Colchester and Tendring, earns £380,394 a year.

The Gazette has tried to contact every surgery in the area, but none that responded admitted the megabucks medic is based there.

It is understood the figure may be the total amount earned by a practice, which would be used to pay the GP’s salary and the costs of running the practice.

Who the fuck is this ‘Gazette’? There’s no external link to anything. Is it TPAs’ ‘in-house’ bullshit spewer?

Who revealed this mystrious Dr is on over a third of a millon bucks? Someone at the Primary Care Trust? A ‘source close to a Doctor’? A dustbin?

If the figure “may be the total amount earned by a practice”, then logic also dictates that the Doctor ‘may not have’ earned a squillion quid, hmm? Eh? Maybe that’s the reason no one owned up to knowing Dr Loadsamoney?

Oh and btw, how much does the TPA bring in? And where from? Why the shyness?

The whole world entitled to free health care on the NHS

July 22nd, 2009 § 2 comments § permalink

The Daily Mail hasn’t earnt itself the nickname The Daily Fail for no reason. This one is an epic.

Apparently some failed asylum seekers are to be allowed free health care on the NHS, that is currently denied to them. Sorry, I should’ve said ‘proposed’. They’re not currently allowed, and it isn’t definately going to happen.
It’s just a proposal.

According to the Daily Mail, the headline goes…

A million failed asylum seekers will get free NHS care in human rights U-turn

A million people will get NHS treatment. That is an assertion of fact. But it’s not a fact. It’s a proposal.

Digging deeper, but not much deeper. In fact only as far as the first line of the story itself…

NHS treatment will be available for tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers to ensure their human rights are honoured, it was announced yesterday.

So it’s not a millon failed asylum seekers, after all. it’s only tens of thousands. Not quite so shocking that number, is it?

The number has dropped significantly because certain criteria would need to be fullfiled, rather than just any asylum seeker. They would need to be destitute with children and various other things. So the proposal’s not open to all.

Strolling through the article the figures get a little more specific still…

There are understood to be around 450,000 failed asylum seekers who have not left the country, although only 10 or 20,000 are directly affected by the new rules.

So there is ‘understood’ to be less then half a million failed asylum seekers in the country and only just tens of thousands at the biggest guess or estimate.
Just think a little about what is being told here.

There are 450,000 failed asylum seekers. What proportion of total applications these failures are I don’t know.
Lets take the bigger 20,000 number that would be directly affected by the proposals. Which means that approximately 4.5% of failed asylum seekers are affected (for the better, remember).

But for the headline to be correct, 50x more failed asylum seekers would need to be eligible, which if it stayed at the same rate would mean there would have to be 22,500,000 failed asylum seekers. Let that sink in for a moment.

Twentytwo and a half million. Failed. Asylum seekers. A number equivalent to a third of the population of Britain.

As I said earler I have no idea of the proportion of total asylum applications the failed ones make, but how many applications are gonna be needed to get a failure rate of 22.5 million?

And where did this original one million figure come from?

According to the Mail, MigrationWatch.

Notes:

  1. I originally came to this Mail article via a post on the BNP site. That article says pretty much the same thing but with out the 10-20,000 figure and a bit more pro-BNP propaganda.
  2. I just realised that there is no time scale mentioned, either. Are these figure for a five year period? A year? Month? Half a week?
  3. I hope my maths has not let me down

Equality in the NHS

June 19th, 2009 § 1 comment § permalink

The BNP are making wild inaccurate claims again. Apparently travellers of various sorts are treated much better than British people…

At least half of all Gypsies and Travellers in Britain are Romany in origin and are officially placed above indigenous British people in a range of National Health Services, according to an official guideline.

The shocking anti-British document emerged in the wake of anti-Gypsy violence in Belfast following months of criminal activity by the Romanian Gypsy community which drove local people to the breaking point

So in the wake of anti Gipsy violence, because they’re all thieves, naturally *rolls eyes*, the BNP are helping to keep the sentiment going.

The BNP site quotes an NHS pamphlet, Primary Care Services Framework: Gypsies & Travellers, which they also shoot there own foot with by providing to a link to a copy they host, and they start off with…

states that many of these “Roma Communities” are recent arrivals, and “possibly comprise half of all Gypsies and Travellers” in England.

According to the NHS, there are up to 300,000 Gypsies and Travellers in Britain in total, which means that there are possibly 150,000 Romany Gypsies living here.

This is indeed nearly true. The pamphlet does say that half of the Gypsies and Travellers in Britain are possibly Roma Gipsies. The 300,000 figure is also mentioned but only as an upper figure for how many travellers and Gypsies are in Britain. That figure might also be as low as 120,000. Nobody really knows any better than that because the 2001 census didn’t count Travellers & Gypsies as a separate ethnic grouping. Which obviously means that the amount of Roma Gipsies could be as low as 60,000.

Under race relations legislation, Romany Gypsies are defined as minority ethnic groups and this forces the NHS to consider their “needs and circumstances” when meeting their general and specific duties under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000.

Just like any other ethnic minority. As it should be.

Along come some bullet points. Makes it nice and simple for the knuckle-draggers…

In practice, the NHS document says, this means the following:

* Gypsies must be “fast tracked” when being provided with NHS services. This means they must be seen before any other patients, even if the indigenous patients have been there earlier or have prior appointments;

There is a recommendation that there should be a policy of not turning away a Traveller or Gypsie that attends a GP without an appointment. There is not a compulsion to, and it certainly doesn’t mean they must be seen straight away before anybody else. In reality, the Traveller could be left to wait until the end of the day.

Doctors have been told to see any Gypsy who walks into a surgery, even if all consultation times for the day are full

What the guidelines incourage, is for the local surgery to register Gypsies and Travellers that are local, on various sites and not to de-register them so quickly, so that a better health record can be built up. The pamphlet also says that when the surgery has got the trust of the Traveller that they will travel a considerable distance to see their doctor. The whole point of this exercise with the NHS is because Gypsies and Travellers do not visit the doctor very often and to try and change that so that the standard of health of these people improves from being the lowest of the English speaking ethnic minorities. The chances of a Gypsie walking in to any surgery is, I would say, pretty slim.

Gypsies are also to be fast tracked for nurses and dental appointments

The pamphlet says nothing about dental and nurse appointments. The BNP have split these types of care from the word ‘surgery’ used in the pamphlet, to mean all types of treatment that is non-emergency type of health problem including visits to the dentist and nurse.

Gypsies must be given 20 minute consultations (in comparison to native British peoples’ five or ten minutes) and must be allowed to bring relatives into the consulting rooms

Again, there is that word ‘must’. Nowhere in this document does it say ‘must’ (except for one instance where the document talks about when a surgery must de-register a patient. Page 28). Practices should give longer consultations. That is generally because the Travellers will ask for another family member to be seen. This request should be accepted within reason.
This is a Good Thing as it enables the doctor to “improve the screening status of potentially vulnerable patients”.

NHS staff are given “mandatory cultural awareness” training so they can fully understand what it is like to be a Traveller or Gypsy

OK. The Nazis have really got in a mix with this one. From the pamphlet…

PCTs’ with Gypsy and Traveller communities should consider including cultural awareness training as part of their regular mandatory training for all new and existing staff.

Still no compulsion. In the mandatory training that everyone gets, cultural awareness training should be considered. It doesn’t even say it should be included. It should just be considered.

The BNP then go on a little rant…

The NHS document tries to justify this blatant anti-British policy by claiming that Gypsies suffer from greater health problems than indigenous British people.

… and quote from the pamphlet about the poor the health is of Gypsies and Travellers but offer no rebuttal of any type to back up their implied claim that the Travelling community don’t suffer greater health problems that ‘true Brits’.

And they finish off with…

The implication of the document is that Primary Care Trusts will be breaking the Human Rights Act and the Race Relations Act of 2000 if they do not discriminate against British people in the ways suggested.

I suppose if you’re paranoid in that way, it could. But the whole tone of the guidelines is just that, a guide. A guide to help make it easier to make an unhealthy section of society healthier.

Technology+Government=???

November 17th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

This story in Technology section of the Guardian Unlimited regarding the new biometric passports reveals that secure, hard to defraud biometric ID cards/passports are either a lot harder to make or, and I suspect this may be the case, the government has not thought it through properly.

…the UK had just begun to issue new, ultra-secure passports, incorporating tiny microchips to store the holder’s details and a digital description of their physical features (known in the jargon as biometrics). These, the argument went, would make identity theft much more difficult and pave the way for the government’s proposed ID cards in 2008 or 2009.

Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don’t look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.

The UK Identity and Passport Service website says the new documents are protected by “an advanced digital encryption technique”. So how come we have the information? What could criminals or terrorists do with it? And what could it mean for the passports and the ID cards that are meant to follow?

And we’re expected to trust these jokers with private, confidential medical information on one big database…?

Keep Our NHS Public Rally 01/11/2006

October 28th, 2006 § 0 comments § permalink

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