Dr Una Coales: The real purpose of the Health Bill and why £1645 does not go far to pay the Health Bill
Dr Una Coales: The real purpose of the Health and Social Care Bill, and why £1645 does not go far to pay the health bill.
Secretary of Conservative Health
The real purpose of the Health Bill
The real purpose of the Health Bill is to keep a terminal NHS alive as long as possible so that when it fails, it will die on another government's watch but not this one, which is why the Coalition government are doing their best to keep it going with suggestions of autonomy and income generating ability to inject into NHS hospitals from the private sector. The NHS is financially unsustainable, which is why some NHS trusts are replacing doctors with nurse consultants, surgeons with nurses doing foot operations, ER doctor consultants with nurse consultants, training nurses to be nurse prescribers, to perform scans instead of doctors, to see patients in breast clinic instead of surgeons, hiring cheaper doctors from the EU to cover shifts in hospital and out of hours services in general practice, closing vital NHS wards and services to keep a hospital open, primary care trusts are refusing some hospital referrals and operations, and so on and so forth, etc.
When Labour conspiracy theories talk of deals with management consultants, they are spinning what was simply a consultation with a leading international management consultancy firm McKinsey asking for advice on how to keep the NHS alive. Why shouldn't a government seek advice from one of the top world experts on management? Doctors consult world experts on cancer treatments? Top companies like McKinsey and Boston Consultancy Group help companies survive and the latter hire the top 1% graduates of Harvard Business School. McKinsey got paid their consultancy fee for their input and that is that.
The NHS is a religion in this country. There is fervor and heated demonstrations whenever anyone mentions changes within their religion. Yet from an economical point of view, there is no chance of survival for a 100% state-owned monopoly in a severe national and global recession. When people bring up the privatisation of railways, they forget to compare the current state to how bad it was before when it was 100% state-owned. They forget they do price comparison shopping with airline prices and now with so many airlines to choose from, prices for transatlantic tickets have dropped significantly over the past 30 years.
Are we privatising the NHS? NO. Is the patient paying? No. We are injecting money as the Coalition government will not let the NHS die on its watch. It would be political suicide to do this. Private income is just one of many ways they are thinking outside of the box to keep the NHS alive longer.
£1645 allocated to each UK citizen in NHS expenditure (based on £102 billion paid for NHS expenditure 2010/11 for 62 million in the UK) does not go far when theNHS pot is further depleted by paying out for medical tourists, ie £30,000 a year for renal dialysis for an elderly EU citizen. Should we tighten rules on medical tourism perhaps?
The NHS pot is depleted even further by the rising costs of obesity (set to cost the NHS £6 billion), the rising costs of an ageing population, the rising costs of NICE drugs that can postpone life by a few months, the rising costs of new innovations, ie a bionic eye for severe retinitis pigmentosa, etc. We went from £11 billion NHS expenditure in 1948 to £102 billion NHS expenditure for 2010/2011 alone. Doesn't take a genius to say how long can we pay this Health Bill when the country is £1.4 trillion in debt and borrowing the interest payments from other countries? Are we forgeting that the Coalition government had to introduce unpopular university fees to help pay this country's bills to keep it from imploding. Are we forgeting that the Coalition government have had to insist on pension changes as there will be no money in the pension pot in 2 years time if they did not? Are we forgeting that the Coalition government inherited a HUGE debt from the spendthrift Labour government? Labour spent and spent for 10 years and encouraged a society of no responsibility. Labour appears to have made a mess of NHS Wales; they do not have a plan B for the NHS. It's time to grow up and face the accounts, the Bill. Without patient input and responsibility to keep healthy, £1645 a year does not go far to pay anyone's Health Bill in 2012.