Cover up the fact that the NHS is limping along under the weight of an estimated £1bn deficit this year alone, with three quarters of hospitals facing the prospect of being in the red by the end of 2014 without an urgent government bailout.
Do not mention that financial problems often directly lead to poor performance, egregious waiting times and low staffing levels that impact on patient safety.
Certainly don’t mention the fact that a French owned company Steria, with various subsidiaries in the guise of a range of acronyms, already control £100billion of NHS spending, including the movement of medical records, patient registration, screening programmes such as cervical and breast screening, payments and primary care contracts. Essentially, huge swathes of the NHS already have been privatised. That ship has sailed.
British healthcare, especially to the Labour Party, is the current political football, and sadly is receiving the same treatment afforded to immigration for decades: do not criticise it, do not propose radical change and brush the big structural issues under the carpet.
The problem with this approach of course is that problems are allowed to go unchecked and the situation is allowed to fester, because nobody is brave enough to talk about the issues. The rare whistleblowers who do are ruthlessly hounded out, threatened and silenced. The Labour Party, realising they are losing votes to UKIP at an increasingly alarming pace, are resorting to an American-style attack tactic no doubt conjured up by their new U.S. strategist David Axelrod. They lash out and try to scare voters away by shouting ‘privatisation’ at the tops of their voices.
UKIP’s policy is simple. We firmly believe that NHS care should be free at the point of access. That’s a non-negotiable. We are the only party opposed to TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which would allow American corporates to win contracts in the NHS and potentially sue the government if changes of policy cut their profits. Labour, and the Tories, both support TTIP.
That is why two days ago, the Guardian trawled up an answer to a question I gave back in 2012, as part of a wider debate about the future of the NHS. Instead of focusing on the excellent conference speech given by Louise Bours in Doncaster this year, where she laid out the party’s health policy, they cropped a few lines from a discussion over two years ago and told their readers that UKIP wanted to privatise the NHS. Just like immigration, it is becoming increasingly impossible to even raise the NHS as a topic for closer examination. The debate is always shut down.
Could this be because the NHS that was run by the Labour Party is in a mess, and actually the only way to fix it would be to abandon the core principles that underpinned its foundation as free at the point of service, afforded and owned by the taxpayers and run by and for the people?
We are an aging society. We are a burgeoning society. We are a society with many different languages, living in an era of medical innovation, new pharmaceuticals and technologies to tackle a wider array of recognised conditions. It is becoming almost an impossibility to keep pace with the rate of change and afford world leading medical care out of the public purse.
But we’re not allowed to talk about it. UKIP’s policy is simple. We firmly believe that NHS care should be free at the point of access. That’s a non-negotiable. We are the only party opposed to TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which would allow American corporates to win contracts in the NHS and potentially sue the government if changes of policy cut their profits. Labour, and the Tories, both support TTIP.
We want everyone coming in to Britain, to live and work, or to visit, to have private medical insurance as a condition of entry, meaning if they seek treatment while they are here, it will be paid for by them and not the British taxpayer, saving the NHS approximately £2bn a year.
We want to scrap hospital parking charges using £200m of those savings to ensure that if you are sick, or visiting a sick friend or relative, you will not have the added stress of paying increasingly eye-watering fees for parking the car. Express.
