Can the Tories be trusted with OUR National Health Service

fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/

From Monday’s edition of Good Morning Scotland, which featured an interview with Professor Allyson Pollock, an extremely experienced academic in the field of healthcare on both sides of the border - Professor Pollock states that the NHS in England has been abolished.

Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 6 February 2017 :
HAYLEY MILLAR (BBC SCOTLAND): How do the [English and Scottish NHS] systems, or services, compare?
PROF. POLLOCK: Well, I think there’s a very important background message to this story, which is that the NHS in England was abolished by the Health And Social Care Act in 2012.
So what’s happening is that in England the NHS is now rapidly being dismantled and privatised – both the delivery and opened up to user charges and changes in funding. And that has a big impact for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which still have their NHS.
Because the funding for the NHS in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales comes through something called the Barnett Formula. So we already have a problem, because Scotland is going to suffer under the Barnett Formula – known as the Barnett squeeze – so the amount of money that it gets from the Treasury is being reduced.
But also, as the NHS is being dismantled in England, funding is being withdrawn from both the NHS and social care, which means that that translates into the Barnett Formula into a real reduction in funding for the countries that still have a national health service.
Nevertheless, Scotland is still much better placed than England – and indeed Wales at the moment – Scotland is in a much stronger position than England with respect to both health and social care. The problem is at the moment that the English government is not committed to a national health service – it has abolished the national health service.
The Secretary of State for Health there has no duty to provide a national health service in England, so the money is now being withdrawn from the National Health Service in England.
And as it’s withdrawn from England, the Treasury at the same time is also withdrawing the funding from Scotland.
Now, Scotland still has a national health service, but if it’s going to retain a proper national planned health service, it does indeed require more funding to come in. But that ultimately is going to be a Treasury decision.
MILLAR: Except we saw the Scottish Government, didn’t we, Allyson Pollock, last week in the budget, saying that there would be more money for the NHS.
POLLOCK: Well, that’s true, but there’s only a limit as to what it can do with the pot of money that it gets from the Treasury, and that is being squeezed, because basically, the Scottish Government gets what’s called a block grant from the Treasury under the fiscal settlement, but it has very little power to alter the size of that grant. It can only move the budget around, as it were – it’s got very limited tax-raising powers.
So actually, we… whatever happens in England, and the dismantling is happening very rapidly, if you think there’s a crisis in Scotland it’s nothing like what’s going on – and I’m here south of the border, both at times in London and in Newcastle – it’s nothing like the scale of the devastation that’s being now wrought in England.
Which is why we need the NHS in England restored, so that then the politicians south of the border will be committed to an NHS, and then the funding will come back in.
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An audio recording of this clip can be found at: wingsoverscotland.com/a-division-of-principles/

Instead of just suggesting that pensioners pay a reduced rate of NI, shouldn't we question the whole basis of NI as it now stands? It's fundementally just another tax now as NI benefits are so much more restricted than they used to be so the rationale for levying it on employees/ employers it could be argued has largely disappeared ( I know the state pension is linked to it but even that has undergone revision). Some people think it should be rolled up into income tax in some way.

POGs - of course I appreciate there is an issue with inappropriate use of the NHS but drunks are not seen by health care staff if there is no injury( although their presence can be a nuisance). I've been to a&we twice in the last 3 years and there was very strict triage through a nurse practitioner. After that, you were routed to a doctor or to a nurse as appropriate and in either case and quite rightly, prioritised within that route. Seriously ill patients are not waiting to be seen whilst a drunk is being prioritised. What is happening is that patients are waiting to be allocated a bed on a ward not because the beds are full of drunks but because those patients fit to be discharged can't be because of the crisis in social care funding. As for charging drunks/ drug abusers for their treatment , how on earth would that happen practically? Staff resources would have to be used to bill them, then follow up non- payment, then what if they did not have sufficient resources to pay for their treatment? And what would you do with a badly injured driver whose accident was caused by drink or drugs? And ill equipped walkers injured falling down a mountainside? I''m not saying things can't be improved - all organisations can be - but with health services, it's really complicated when you actually start to think how it would be operationalised.

FarNorth - distinguished as prof pollock may be, she is clearly talking rubbish. Sounds more like a grandstanding politician than a serious academic. "The NHS in England was abolished., ". Truly pathetic!
Jen - the Guardian article is worrying. i can't see how aGP practice can efficiently operate an NHS surgery and a private practice surgery. You just know the former will take second place.

It was abolished as it stood. It was linked to the social care system, and the secretary of state was not held responsible any more. He no longer has a duty to provide an NHS. I was in hospital the day it was brought in. No accident that it was April Fool's Day.
Now with the STPs it is no longer going to be national.

Allyson Pollock helped to write the reinstatement bill which is going to be debated on 24th February.

If the Tories treated all councils the way they are treating Surrey, it would help the NHS as a whole.
If all councils were allowed to keep their business rates it would add up to a lot of help for social care, which would help the NHS.

However, I don't trust the Tory government to do this.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/pmqs-labour-councils-sweetheart-deal-surrey-theresa-may-austerity-a7571156.html

Jen - thanks for the explanation. I now understand what the professor was saying. But from what I have read (not that much i admit) all councils have the same opportunity to do what Surrey are doing, or at least to participate in what I think is at this stage a pilot scheme?

joelsnan however many younger immigrants you have or don't have, it does not alter the basic fact that at the moment, year on year, there are more elderly people needing more care. However many younger people there are, the raw number of older people is climbing quite rapidly.
Even if we had a perfect system for discharging people from hospital (and I agree we are a long, long way from that) there would still be more people every year having cancer, having falls, having pneumonia etc. Therefore demand at the front door of an NHS hospital will get bigger than the year before, every year, for the next few decades, and then stay high for about another decade or so, before it starts to decline a bit.
Immigration helps the NHS because we need more young working people paying taxes to pay for all this healthcare.

Just saw CEO of Manchester Health and Social Care on TV. He says they have over £6bn in grant from govt. and seemed to be saying they are coping unite well apart from the need for more help in moving elderly people from hospital beds to a safe environment when they can be discharged. He said they need £76m more, which didn't seem much to me in the context of a £6bn budget, but clearly critical. The new money released from council tax will generate £9m for them.

Whilst we are all blaming the young, the old, the immigrant for the failings for the NHS, the core issue is the government's intention is to continue with the privatisation of health services.
I consider that a major factor in this ideology is to divest the pension liability that the NHS has. It is said that the NHS is/was one of the highest volume employers in Europe. The pension/superannuation scheme is vast and expensive. By outsourcing services new employees would be enrolled in the private providers scheme thereby reducing the burden on NHS.
The government knows that industrial action would arise if this was common knowledge so use other blaming strategies to get the populous on their side to continue the privatisation drive.

Joelsnan - if what you say is true, which I'm sure it isn't, why would it be wrong to save huge amounts of NHS funds from being channelled into expensive DB pensions? Public pensions soak up more govt. money than anything else.

Fitzy, none of the other councils knew about this deal with the government until Corbyn brought it up in PMQs. This is interesting from Polly Toynbee in the Guardian.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/09/surrey-council-tax-referendum-david-hodge-cuts

If the government had given this deal to all councils, do you not think it would have been front page news?

Jeremy Hunt has at last admitted that there is a problem with the NHS.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/10/nhs-problems-completely-unacceptable-admits-jeremy-hunt/

Hasn't said what the solution is, though, other than sending people with dementia back into the community. It has to be long-term and sustainable, the buzz-word of the decade.

Fitzy54 So you are convinced my hypothesis is not true, can you counter claim?
If you acknowledge to probability of my hypothesis being proven then the process does make sense. This is the same process that is taking place throughout organisations that could be deemed Civil Service, even though some organisations are effective effective the majority have either been sold off to private concerns (think Royal Mail) or have outsourced the majority of services to divest pension liability.
Thinking about it then yes why should the general public pay the generous pensions of Civil Servants (NHS) when the have already paid their salaries and have to fund their own pension pots. But, it is shown that in many instances the service delivery of these outsourced organisation is poorer than the Civil Service providers.
Personally I cannot see privatisation being cheaper, yes these organisations will provide their employees a decent wage and a pension, though a poorer pension than the NHS, but the share dividends to investors has to be factored in so at end of the day the NHS or whoever still ends up paying more.

I'm not saying the govt. did publicise it before Corbyns sweetheart speech, nor am I convinced it was a sweetheart deal. But it's out in the open now and, presumably, generally available.

The general public does not pay it all, though.
Anyone working in teaching, NHS, local authority pays towards their pension. It can be as much as 10-12% in superannuation.
How many people working for private companies put that much aside for their pensions?

Joelsnan I can't disprove your hypothesis any more than you can prove it. We'll just have to agree that you believe it and I don't. Or I should say, I do believe that the govt. wants to find the most efficient way of providing free and adequate healthcare to us all, and that they do see the private sector as having a role to play, partially because, in some cases, it's cheaper. I think they are right. I also think, and believe the govt. agree, that public sector controlled services are often the best way to go.

No, No, No

Jen those in govt. schemes have to contribute a lot because of the massive cost. Anyone in a private scheme (if they had any sense) would bite their employer's hand off for a similar deal. One immediate and complete fix for the NHS would be to swap its budget with the govt. pensions budget. A lot of pensions would take a huge hit but the NHS would be awash with cash. I'm not seriously suggesting that as a solution, but I'm just putting things into perspective. Complain about the Tories all you like, but they have a lot of bills to pay!

Rigby

'of course I appreciate there is an issue with inappropriate use of the NHS but drunks are not seen by health care staff if there is no injury'

"Seriously ill patients are not waiting to be seen whilst a drunk is being prioritised"

I was speaking from experience Rigby and I can assure you the time wasting by those under the influence of whatever are a bloody nuisance and they expected the staff to attend to them and did not consider what was going on around them, they were ' out of it', not able to think rationally due to the drink or drugs. If A & E staff are having to deal with those who abuse the A & E it stands to reason, stating the obvious, other patients in A & E are being deprived of the time from those staff.

I consider a nurse holding a sick bowl for somebody who is drunk, a nurse looking at a cut that requires a plaster the size of a stamp an abuse of the NHS. The physical and verbal abuse our medics have to deal with is atrocious.

We will beg to differ but have you been to a large city center A & E on a busy night, it is an eye opener.

Well pogs I think your post needs a bit of perspective. Yes drunks are a pain in the ass, and in my opinion need a slap. But patients are triaged on entry. Both DH and myself had heart episodes last year. DH far worse. But we took priority over everyone else. At one stage it was difficult to count the amount of staff around my husband each clearly having a job to do. This will apply to any life threatening or serious problem. So no, staff are not wasting their time. I live in a large university city. However whether there are questions and decisions to be made regarding certain types of illness presenting at A&E is another issue.

www.taxpayersalliance.com/nhs_pensions_are_bleeding_the_taxpayer_dry
The 2015 accounts show a NHS pensions liability of £382 billion.
The scheme is pay as you go with any surplus being paid back into the treasury it has no assets.
The accounts are online to view at:
www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/Documents/Pensions/56324_NHS_Pension_Scheme_HC_370_Web_only_(2015-16_accounts).pdf

The blame game should stop, it's not the elderly, not the drunks etc.

It is underfunding pure and simple.

OK WW

I must be lying.