NHS bill: goodbye comprehensive healthcare, hello private insurance

Andrew Lansley and his colleagues assure us that under their plans to privatise the NHS, “services will still be free at the point of use”. But they fail to add a key proviso: provided the services are still available. In reality, a growing list of services won’t be available, and so won’t be free.

Of course, some services that the NHS originally provided, such as long-term care for frail older people, have long been officially withdrawn; and others, like prescriptions and dentistry, are still provided but subject to charges. Under the health and social care bill there will be further contraction of what is provided free on the NHS. Local clinical commissioning groups, not the secretary of state, will decide what services it is “reasonable” to provide out of the budgets they are given, and the package will gradually contract.

This process has already begun under the pressure of the so-called productivity savings recommended by McKinsey. NHS services are being withdrawn in an unannounced, piecemeal and unaccountable way.

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