Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill (the NHS Bill) can and must be stopped.
The latest blow to his ambitions to slice and dice the NHS and offer it to the corporate vultures as a carcass comes from the Health Select Committee of Parliament, which will report that Lansley's "reforms" will are interfering with the already demanding and damaging process of trying to make 4% annual efficiency savings.
This is in addition to the demands of all the major health workers organisations who are united in wanting the Coalition to drop the bill.
Core criticisms are:
- It will cost £2-3 billion
- It ends the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Health for the NHS.
- It has no electoral mandate. It is not in the Conservative or LibDem manifestos or even the Coalition agreement.
- It contains a clause that NHS hospitals can earn up to 49% of their income from private patients.
- Giving full budgetary responsibility to GPs will distract from their attention to patients and break the vital bond of trust.
- It opens up the NHS to marketization which will allow progressive infiltration by American private healthcare corporations who are desperate to grow now that they have finished growing in the USA.
- An enormous array of informed health organisations oppose it.
These are just a few of the reasons to oppose the bill.
If it is not defeated, the British people will have let one of the best institutions in our country to die through ignorance, apathy and resignation.
It can be stopped. There is a Parliamentary ePetition that simply calls for MPs to debate a motion to Drop The Bill. It is here. Please sign it and ask your friends to sign it. It is has reached 34,000 today, and when it reaches 100,000 MPs will be obliged to debate dropping the bill. We will need to besiege Parliament on the day of the debate in order to focus the minds of the MPs.
5 comments:
Thanks for bringing the petition to my attention. Clicked and signed by myself and my husband.
I think we need to do more than sign the petition though...
I wish I knew what.
Anonymous, you're right. We sign the petition, tell our family and friends, and then when the MPs get down to the debate, we fill the Strangers' Gallery and Parliament Square with a noisy crowd. That's what.
The BBCom decision to deny the epetition's call for a debate is yet another example of Cameron's sham democracy. But it's not true that Lansley's plans for NHS 'reforms' were not in the Torie's manifesto. They were, but of course, the devil is in the detail and the vast majority of the electorate do not read party manifestos- they rely on slick platform promises and soundbites such as Cameron's infamous 'No top-down reorganisation of the NHS'. The Tories rely on voter apathy and it looks as if they were right to do so, even when it comes to the NHS, that last vestige of a fair society. We must do more than sign the petition - we must get out on the streets and make our dissent visible. We must let LibDem MPs and councillors know that they will be unelectable if the NHS is destroyed and put pressure on them to vote to drop the bill at their Spring conference. Unless Clegg drops his support for the bill, the NHS is dead.
You're right, Cygnus. I had a look at the Try manifesto, and there it was, in a few hundred words.
I agree, we have to kick up about this. Non-violently, of course.
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