Imagine a future where our healthcare system looks like the one in the U.S?
Where you have to pull out a credit card.
when you go to an A&E before you receive any treatment.
Where over half a million families go bankrupt every single year
that's not a future we want.
75 years ago today the NHS was born
and 75 years later we see the service starved of cash and on its knees.
And it's in that state because of the actions of politicians,
and now the service is getting infiltrated by private companies
who are swooping in and taking advantage of this situation
while patients are unable to access what they need.
U.S healthcare companies are buying up dozens of GP surgeries.
We're in a situation where 7.4 million patients are unable
to access treatment because they're on a waiting list.
We had a situation this winter where up to 500 people died every single week
because they couldn't access the urgent care they need.
Things were so crowded that patients were receiving
life-saving treatment in cupboards,
and people will calling for ambulances that didn't arrive.
It is an emergency there should always be money to pay for emergencies.
The underfunding of the NHS is a political decision
why is there not the money to rebuild the NHS that we need to save lives
and keep it going for the next 75 years.
We need to wake up to what's going on and hold politicians to account.
You've got to follow the money in politics:
Theresa May,
Sajid Javid,
John Redwoods,
Lee Anderson,
David Lammy,
Wes Streeting,
Keir Starmer.
What influence is actually being carried by money
moving from private hands to the politicians
or to the causes that the politicians support?
Now not all these people are receiving money directly
from private health care companies
sometimes it's because they do things like work for a private investment firm
who has huge investment globally in the private Health Care sector
but all of those things are still linked.
I don't think MPs should be allowed to accept big speaking fees
or donations from anyone in the private sector.
We know what goes on in the US we know how much
that determines politics and elections
I don't know why we're so blind to it in our country,
Money is not given freely for no reason.
I don't think there should be any link
between private health care and politicians.
The reason that the NHS was so successful is that it eliminated money from the conversation about
who needed health care and that's an enormously powerful thing when I was working in the service
as a clinician the knowledge that I was able to deliver whatever it was that the patient
needed based purely on their clinical need and that's the thing that got them to the front of
the queue not their ability to pay it creates a really fair system if you're a private company
and you come in and you take public money to run a public service you don't just have the original
goals that the NHS Services have you've got an additional prior and that priority is profit
for your shareholders now anyone who says that that motive is not going to interfere with all
of the other decision making when you're running a healthcare service is just being silly because
running a business involves things like cost cutting and that impacts on patients a study
that has come out last summer from the Lancet and it looks like in areas where there is more
Outsourcing to private companies there is an excess mortality patient care has suffered and
there is a link between people dying unnecessarily the knowledge that private Outsourcing could be
leading to unnecessarily deaths should be an absolute alarm Bell for the politicians who
are running the NHS sometimes when I talk about privatization people who probably haven't been
watching it closely because it's not covered very well by the media talk about me and other
people like we're conspiracy theorists as if we're making it all up but if you just look
at the legislative changes that have happened to the NHS since the 1980s each one has introduced
a new layer of privatization into the service the latest iteration of a reform which is the
Health and Care Act 22 broke up the NHS in England into 42 Parts called integrated Care Systems and
a lot of people who are experts looking at what goes on in the U.S in terms of their healthcare
insurance system suspect that the reason this has happened is to Aid a move the next step which is
to introduce a healthcare insurance model in the UK I suspect those people are correct this idea
is being seeded out into the public that we need to change the model of Health Care in this country
and it's being done very cleverly because the service has been starved of resource to the point
that it's now crippled and people are unable to access what they need and when people are scared
and frustrated they seek answer and the answers that are there being fed by many of the mainstream
media Outlets is that perhaps the NHS is simply not fit for purpose and perhaps we need to look
for a different model and it's very clever because a lot of people are scared and anxious they don't
really understand what the vested interests in all of this is but the other issue is the underfunding
since 2010 the conservative government has underfunded and under-resourced the service to
an alarming degree and we're now in a situation where we have the longest NHS waiting lists on
record they've not been investing properly in the investment into the capital infrastructure of the
system so we've got a situation where the NHS in England has over 10 billion pounds in unmet
repairs and that's causing things like hundreds of sewage leaks into a E's maternity units cancer
Awards and they're not fixing these problems and some of these problems have been judged in report
to be causing a significant risk to patients and staff and maybe the biggest problem of all is
their lack of support for the workforce you cannot run a world-leading health care system if you do
not support the staff NHS Consultants probably the most glaring example of the cuts in Pay they've
had a 34.9 cut in their income in real term since 2008-2009 Consultants are earning more than a lot
of the members of Staff right so if you think about the real terms cuts for Porters or nurses
or Health Care assistants some of those people are now struggling to cope in a cost-of-living
crisis many NHS trusts in England now have their own food bank for staff and that is an appalling
situation if this service is something that we value and we do then we should be valuing the
staff and treating them properly because at the moment they're struggling to even put food on the
table I think it's particularly pertinent at the moment that politicians are able to make these
decisions that affect the pub public and many of them then leave politics and go on to high paid
positions in the private sector and meanwhile who's the person who can't get their treatment
on the NHS what's the patient and the person who's made those decisions has walked off into
the sunset unaffected unaccountable and I think that's got to change I think if you put all of
these things together you can't honestly feel that this government is trying to fix the problems in
the NHS because if they did want to fix those problems they wouldn't be funneling money into
the private sector to spend millions of pounds on management Consultants they would be spending that
public money paying the staff properly getting this service up and running again to save lives
the reality is we talk a lot about waiting times as if someone's sitting in a seat like
I am now waiting but it's just an inconvenience it's not a problem it's just I need to be more
patient for what I'm going to get but it's not that way if you're waiting for treatment
in the NHS you might develop more symptoms you might become dependent on pain medication you've
been prescribed you might develop mental health problems you might lose your job it might break
down your personal relationships you might commit suicide because of the horrible symptoms you've
had to sustain for many months or years while you've waited for the treatment which you pay
for through your taxes and yet is being denied to you and that is what's not focused on and
during the winter crises we think a lot about ambulances we send news crews to ambulance base
of hospitals there's a lot of excitement almost talking about the tragic circumstances that lead
to isolated cases of patients dying in horrible ways when they can't get the treatment they need
but the reality is that this is a situation now affecting millions of people in non-glamorous
ways who are sitting in their houses whose voices are not heard and who are being failed by this
government it's life or death in some of these situations and when we think about the people
who are excluded from care and excluded from this public conversation it's often the most vulnerable
people in our society it's the elderly people or the disabled people or the people with severe and
enduring mental health problems many of whom don't have a support network many of whom don't have the
funds to pay for Private health care they need this safety net and it's a safety net that brings
us all up if we have a healthy population we have a population with more energy who can be more
productive and that affects everything it affects our economy it affects happiness it affects the
progress we can make as a society politicians often boil it down into this budget or that budget
what we can afford what we can't afford and we lose big picture we've really got to ask ourselves
what kind of a society we want in 1948 we decided that we wanted this service because we wanted to
care for every single person in our society and that everybody deserved a chance and now with
this government with this political landscape it feels like a lot of people don't have a chance
anymore there's cost of living crisis there's an energy crisis the economy is shot there's so many
people struggling and our Healthcare System is in tatters and there's a sort of complacency or
an excuse being made by politicians that because all these things are a problem therefore there's
not enough money to fix any of these problems it's not good enough there are so many times
in history where humans have recognized that they're in a situation of Crisis and they've
come together and overcome obstacles to build something fantastic and that's what the NHS was in
the first place it was built in the aftermath of the second world war when our country had so many
struggles and yet this fantastic thing was built and I think right now we have an opportunity for
bold transformative ideas that will Mark progress for our society going forward it's an opportunity
and politicians are not taking that opportunity it's ludicrous we need the politicians who are
going to come in and look at this and decide that they want to transform this for the better and the
reason for that is that the NHS has transformed millions of lives over the last 75 years and it
has the potential to transform millions of lives for the next 75 years but it is only going to do
it if we push politicians into action there's a lot of talk at the moment about cost and I'm sure
there'll be people watching this who say you're not talking about how much this will cost it will
cost a lot of money but we need to stop talking about cost and start talking about value and
prioritizing things politically based on what the public wants not what politicians want not what
their donors want not what healthcare companies want what the public wants because this is a
public service funded by the taxpayer there are so many problems in the media at the moment and
we really need independent Outlets to be able to have a voice if you can support Double Down
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