I rely on the NHS — I make no bold claim otherwise.
Without NHS health care I would be dead. Because of the long-term effects of my battle with health, I would not qualify for health insura nce. So, once again, I felt moved to write to Andrew Jones MP.
I intend to write a letter a week to Andrew Jones from now on — the Conservative administration is elected but I know of people who have died directly as a result of Welfare To Work schemes.
The Conservative administration have torn England in two with Brexit and threatened the abolition of the Union through their ill-conceived break with Europe. It will be a domino effect, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Whilst I have always believed it is up to an individual to govern himself, I now think that all governments are Systems and Systems kill.
What is May’s Cabinet other than the Big-Business / Industrial-Military Complex — dividing a nation for a share of the profits for themselves?
Dear Andrew Jones MP,
The NHS in England is being dismantled. NHS services — including acute and emergency, children’s, elderly and maternity care — have been deliberately underfunded since 2010. The comprehensive care we’ve come to expect continues to be cut back.
Many services have been handed to private companies such as Virgin, Serco and US giant United Health, hiding behind the NHS logo. Valuable NHS buildings and land are being sold off to property developers, often as a result of the exorbitant costs of paying for new hospitals built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
These are our services and our assets. We the public own them. And polls repeatedly show that most of us want to keep our NHS.
Privatised services cost the NHS and tax payer far more than when provided by our publicly owned and publicly run NHS.
That is because public health systems don’t seek profits. They don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders. They don’t have the added costs of private sector loans. And they don’t have to pay the management fees that private companies charge.
A public NHS also doesn’t have privatisation’s heavy marketing and contract administration costs of extra lawyers, accountants and management — at least £4.5 billion annually on one estimate and rising. Just cutting them, not NHS services, would go a long way to cover the shortfall between government underfunding and the NHS’ needs over the next 5 years.
These huge commercial costs and the chaos caused by the ongoing NHS fragmentation are the direct result of privatisation. This is endangering the quality and safety of our public healthcare.
Privatisation isn’t just bad for the tax-payer. It’s bad for our health.
The Bill was presented to Parliament in July 2015 by Caroline Lucas MP with the cross-party support of 77 MPs. It is backed by the Green Party and the SNP, as well as by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and other Labour MPs, one Plaid Cymru and one Liberal Democrat MP.
Please do what is right and defend our NHS. The National Health Service has been one of the UK’s greatest achievements. For 65 years it has provided a cost effective, universal health service, free at the point of need to all people irrespective of their background, circumstance or ability to pay.
Yet over the last 25 years, this founding vision has been slowly but surely eroded. The final blow was the Health and Social Care Act 2012, forcing a commercialised model on the NHS in England.
I believe that campaigning to reinstate the founding vision is critical. For more information, please visit https://www.nhsbill2015.org/ to see a far more articulate account of the reasons people should not have to choose between being healthy and bankruptcy Andrew Jones.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew
