Pausing Or Breakneck Speed Towards NHS Privatisation? Why Should We Believe A Word Cameron Says Anymore?

Oh Dear Mr Cameron someone that tells as many lies as you should develop a better memory. This video clip shows the extent of lies and hypocrisy of Cameron.

Second Relaunch of Tory NHS Reforms

After months of this Tory government trying to bully medical professionals and the public into submission over the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley's NHS reforms, we are now being told by Prime Minister, David Cameron, that the government are listening and now apparently they are now going to take a further 2 months to listen some more!  They are trying to relaunch their NHS reforms package for the 2nd time, someone tell them when attempting this with a very sceptical electorate it is not a very good idea to start off with a blatant deception. Cameron, Clegg and Lansley are selling this "listening exercise" as something they have conceded in order to listen to the concerns expressed over this bill, don't be fooled, this so-called listening period is not something that the government have conceded it is in fact a "natural break" in the bill's passage which would have occurred anyway. Obviously you can take the man out of public relations, but you cannot take public relations out of the man! This is is no listening exercise, it is just another cheap and nasty PR stunt from the ex PR man Cameron, yet again this government are deliberately misleading the British public.

What is the point in "fan-faring" this "listening" deception anyway? Cameron has already declared they will listen to our concerns but the reforms are going to go ahead anyway, so what is the point of the whole lie? Perhaps I am cynical but his whole listening misconception has precious little to do with wanting to take on board our concerns over these reforms but more to do with the growing revolt in the Lib Dems over the NHS and Clegg's ever dwindling popularity. Not forgetting the little matter of the May elections and the AV referendum, that this little pointless listening exercise will cover, all this is doing is deferring the inevitable. I wonder if most people realise that the government is already in the process of  privatising reforming the NHS? If David Cameron is going to keep lying to us and keep deliberately misleading us, he should do something about his memory and stop assuming that we do not have one and are too stupid to understand the profundity of his innuendos, lies, half truths and misconceptions.

The process of NHS Reforms already started in 2010 in at least three significant ways, which I will attempt to explain.

1. PATHFINDERS: In his first speech on the launch of Lansley's white paper, Mr Cameron argued new powers for GP consortia to take control of NHS budgets and directly commission services were a vital act of modernisation and sticking to the ‘status quo’ of PCTs and SHA’s was not an option.
   ‘People said there would be no appetite for this,’ he said. ‘Far from fearing new commissioning arrangements, over 140 GP-led consortia have now come forward, covering over half the country.’
   But Dr Chaand Nagpaul, GPC lead negotiator for commissioning, said the reason GPs were responding was in a desperate bid to save the NHS from collapse.
   ‘The term pathfinder has become a misnomer,’ he said. ‘Many GPs are acting only because they see PCTs imploding before their eyes and are worried that unless they accelerate their plans the NHS will collapse.’ The government know this but Cameron chose not to tell us, instead he chose to totally misrepresent most GPs taking part in the "pathfinder" so-called trials. They are NOT trials, this is a bid by the government to get as many on board as they possibly can to stay on course for the reforms completion year of 2013. The only crisis in the NHS, are those this government are introducing.
2. NHS DIRECT- Privatisation is already underway: The news first broke of Lansley's  plans for NHS Direct because he himself let it slip.  Until Lansley's apparent indiscretion, the official government line was that a new free telephone service, NHS 111, would not replace existing local telephone services or NHS Direct but might do so in the longer term if a pilot scheme is successful.
   Well of course it turns out that we have been lied to and deceived again as NHS 111 is to take the place of NHS Direct and it is not just a change of phone number. The Department of Health has confirmed that NHS 111 would replace NHS Direct within three years. The new service is undergoing trials in County Durham and Darlington and now in Nottigham with further pilots in Lincolnshire and Luton.
    Would it surprise you to learn that the scheme was actually put forward to Andrew Lansley by a think tank called 2020Health, in June 2010 and just barely 2 months later with virtually no consultation the scheme was underway? By coincidence  2020health have their offices just up from parliament at 83 Victoria Street and Andrew Lansley has described the think tank 2020health saying; “I have been very impressed with some of the discussions and documents that have emerged from 2020health. They are looking at serious issues and providing valuable impact on future policy”, those "policies" that Lansley casually mentions include giving more NHS work to private sector companies.  The news that suggested NHS Direct was to be axed caused a public outcry, however, Lansley got out of it by explaining that it was just being trialled and piloted. Of course what Andrew Lansley did not tell us was that he had been fed this idea by a think tank that has close ties to the Tory party and is run by someone called Tom Sackville who was a previous Conservative health minister. www.2020health.org describes itself as an independent grass roots think tank, funded by people like you, for people like you. It takes a lot of money from pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Novartis, Lilly, in order to push their agendas, it also takes money from companies looking to get into tele-health market like BT and *VODAFONE* and 2020Health's connections to Tories like Lansley and Sackville put it in an excellent position to influence government policies. 2020health chairman is ex Tory health minister Tom Sackville. ( George Osborne recently wrote off Vodafone's £6 billion tax bill it owed to the British Treasury) In the areas where NHS 111 is being piloted they have got rid of most of the trained experienced medical professionals and the phones are being manned by people who have not had any medical training. The new call centre operators have only been given a nominal 3 day briefing before being put on the phones to field calls from the public over health concerns. Since the government have reduced the number of trained staff in these centres, more callers are being referred straight to accident service by operators who lack experience and confidence to make the correct decisions. Not only is this dangerous because for every person being referred to hospital emergency departments incorrectly, there will be many not being referred to seek urgent treatment when they should. The scheme is also self-defeating as the whole idea is to decrease the workload on accident and emergency departments not increase it. 
   In Lincolnshire 30 triage nurses who assess calls to out-of-hours GP services have been told they could lose their jobs due to a pilot scheme for the 111 service in the area.
   From April their role will be performed by the new non-emergency helpline, which is run by NHS Direct and staffed by non-nursing call handlers.
   Lincolnshire is one of the areas to test the 111 number in a year-long pilot, which was announced in November.
3. PRIVATE CONTRACTS:  A London authority became the first to award the first *PRIVATE* contract. The KPMG Partnership for Commissioning has won one of the first contracts to support development of the early waves of pathfinders across London, to help GPs become the commissioners of healthcare in the very near future. The partnership claimed to be the first of its kind and sees KPMG teaming up with a company called UnitedHealth UK and The National Association of Primary Care (NAPC), Healthskills, NHS Primary Care Commissioning and the legal firm Morgan Cole. Incidentally UnitedHealth UK is affiliated to the US UnitedHealth company UnitedHealth has faced accusations of overcharging and malpractice in a series of legal suits.
   In 2008 it agreed to pay $50m after the New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo sued the company "as part of a broad probe into how insurers pay doctors and hospitals that aren't in the companies networks". According to Cuomo, UnitedHealth's Ingenix unit operated a "defective and manipulated database" to set charges for medical services. Its California subsidiary was fined a record $3.5m in the same year for mishandled claims against patients and doctors. In 2006 The UnitedHealth chief executive William McGuire resigned after an investigation "concluded he had received stock option grants 'likely backdated' to allow insiders to maximise financial gains." During his tenure as chief executive, McGuire was granted more than $1.6bn in stock options. In 2007, McGuire avoided trial after he agreed to repay $468m. This is the kind of company that the Conservative government is encouraging to bid for parts of the British NHS under the "Any Willing Provider" scheme.

None of the above could be called "pilots or trials", not by any sense of the imagination. They are NOT pilot schemes, they are the REAL thing. The NHS is being privatised by the Tory government under our very noses. I have used just three examples there are a great many more examples that clearly indicate the path in which this government is taking the NHS.

Don't be fooled, the government have not just launched a listening campaign, what they are doing is launching a TELLING campaign, at the end of these 2 months we will be told that they are making concessions, which will turn out to be minor concessions and adjustments that would have been made in any case and that the reforms will be going ahead.

This Tory-led  government is hell bent on inflicting their ideology on the NHS and us and they are hell bent on privatising it and all the bluff and bluster I heard coming out of Frimley Park Hospital by Cameron, Clegg and Lansley is just flim-flam and complete lies, and once again this feckless government and this supercilious trio of Cameron, Clegg and Lansley are deliberately misleading the British public. It does not matter how many times they utter their soundbites and tell us they are going to "pause, listen and reflect" or whichever words they choose, they are NOT pausing, in fact if you read above you will see this government is going at breakneck speed to privatise our NHS and it is happening right under our noses and has been happening ever since this government assumed power. The proof of it all is all around. they want their reforms completed by 2013, I assume because they feel if this government runs its full term, in 2015 they hope people will have forgiven and forgotten that they took a wonderful and functioning health service one of the best in the world and totally ruined it, causing mayhem and disruption with the inevitable loss of life - they should think again.

Remember that once the NHS has gone, it has gone, there will be NO turning back, no government will be able to undo the harm that this government are already inflicting upon the NHS, like the trains, the NHS will be broken up and fragmentised so much it will be impossible to put it back together again and like the trains fiasco, there will be very little accountability, no one will know who is responsible for what and when, private health companies will be cherry picking all the bits they can make money out of and leaving the rest for cash strapped NHS Trusts to deal with. Since this government came into power and abolished targets:

• NHS hospital waiting lists are rising alarmingly.
• Waiting times for out patient appointments are rising.
• Waiting times to see specialist are rising.
• Waiting times in Accident and Emergency Departments are rising.
• The number of patients on trolleys waiting for hospital beds is rising.
• The number of hospital beds available is falling.
• Bed blocking is rising as patient care in the community is affected by Tory cuts.
• Bed Blocking is also happening because the government are trying to fine hospital doctors if a patient is readmitted within a certain time for the same ailment, doctors are now scared to discharge a patient.

Incidentally Lansley's proposed 3 month pausing and listening scheme has, in the space of 2 days, already been reduced to 2 months!

Also bear in mind, that this government would not be in a position to do all of this if it were not for the backing of the Liberal Democrats, a cursory glance at the way Clegg enthusiastically has backed these NHS Reforms is a testament to how far on the right of his party he actually is, Clegg is not a Liberal Democrat, he is a Tory and a true die in wold blue Tory at that!

No matter what fancy language the Tory government chooses we know what they are up to with our NHS, neither "coalition" party had this in their manifesto, neither told what they were going to do with the NHS if they got their hands on it, if they did then they would never have been given the chance, this government know this, which is why they practiced the deceit they did. This government has NO mandate to do this, forget the ridiculous total waste of money on AV referendum, it is the NHS reforms that should have been put to a referendum, so grave and so far reaching are the changes. One further lie that Cameron exposed of himself, in his speech on Lansley's white paper, Cameron let slip that these reforms were being cooked up by Lansley for some time, in fact we now know that Lansley has been working on these NHS reforms for the past EIGHT YEARS!  So why was Cameron touring the country telling every one that there would "no top down re-organisation of the NHS" when he knew fully well that Andre Lansley was working on the biggest reforms of the NHS since its conception over 60 years ago? Once again Cameron exposed for the liar he is. Why should we believe anything David Cameron says?

The Tory Government should "PAUSE, LISTEN and REFLECT" upon this:

Hands OFF our NHS, it is NOT for sale, you touch it at your peril! Insist on this and it will end with the early demise of this lousy government - see you in the ballot box!