You should read this piece by John Lister very carefully indeed. The idea that siphoning off public money as profit for capitalists will improve the NHS is obvious rubbish. This is the issue over which I left the Liberals/Lib Dems after over 35 years of membership, and plainly I was right.
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Simply selling off what is left of the family silver.
GP tells Andrew Lansley NHS reforms are ‘wonk’
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The GP and comedian Dr Phil Hammond has told the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley that the medical profession is “deeply suspicious” of the planned NHS reforms which he described as “wonk”.
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He said there was no convincing narrative explaining the reasons for the changes and that the reforms focus on competition rather than the collaboration and co-operation needed for an integrated service.
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Watch more on the Question Time website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/9615324.stm
Its really all about
http://www.bitebackart.org.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/b/a/banking_on_nhs_1.jpg
This country is going the way of America. In America people have to pay to go to hospital, while the American government sends American taxes to Israel, where people have free healthcare.
Pretty soon our taxes will start going there too.
Ali Parsa a banker and former Executive Director of Goldman Sachs’ European Technology Investment banking team and chief executive of Circle was interviewed on ITV last night and stealthily managed to avoid telling us how this NHS hospital will make a profit, while stating he would not cut jobs or services at the hospital.
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THIS TAKEOVER IS A CONSERVATIVE PLAN TO CRUSH OUR NHS SERVICE BY DECEPTION IN FAVOUR OF A MEDICARE type health insurance scheme initiated by giving priority to people waiting for a variety of ‘minor’ day surgery operations such as varicose vein strips, hernias, fibroid removal etc and lucrative fertility treatments.
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The seeds of ‘rot’ has been planted and that ‘cancer’ will spread through the NHS. Doing nothing I believe is not an option and I for one now have 3 months to gain support from NHS nurses, doctors and surgeons, starting with a Facebook awareness compaign to stifle agent Cameron’s short/long term health plans.
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THE TORY GOVERNMENT WILL RUIN OUR COMMUNITIES BY PRIVATISING OUR HEALTH SYSTEM.
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http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article31483.html
Is it just me ?, or has anyone noticed that a LOT of young (and some not so young) doctors these days seem to be very right wing. I was told by my (not so young) doctor in 1999, that if I didn`t submit to having a major operation (that I may not have survived) “not to bother coming back to him, to get sick notes”!!!. I changed my doctor.
I have just an alarum with my dog. When I heard a crash in the kitchen I found the pedal bin had been knocked over. Lily was at a bag of dry dog food which when new weighed 3 kgs. It now weighs under 1 kg!!. None of the vets in this area operate 24 hours’ cover including the vets I go to and a firm called **** use vets’ premises and facilities out of hours. I found I was back at the practice where I was the manager 30 years ago which was a bit weird.
Lily was injected with an emetic, will be kept in overnight and ‘monitored’. She will have a drip if needed. I was given a printed estimate of £280, had to sign a consent form and pay half the amount as deposit. I will pick her up at 7.30 tomorrow. Fortunately I am insured with an excess. If not whatever do people do?
I felt I was in training to be a patient in Mr Lansley’s new NHS when I was handing over my credit card.
If I had left her it was likely that the pellets would swell inside and cause damage to her digestive tract and bloat, or that she would be constipated and be dehydrated. How she got the bag down off the kitchen counter and how she opened the bag (one of those rigid plastic sealed up ones that I have difficulty opening) I will never know. Also how did she eat the stuff in such a short time. She was lying here on the floor in front of me when the phone rang and I was only on for a few minutes talking to a friend about the Gaza disabled athletes on Unreported World, when I heard the crash of the pedal bin.
The article does indeed reward a close reading. As far as I can tell the Hitchenbrooke project referred to has no commercial legs whatsoever. Circle are simply the trojan horse to crack open the NHS to a commercial imperative. It is very difficult to not come to the conclusion that there is connivance among government and large private commerce interests, to place the public funded system under the control of profit seeking carpetbaggers.
In essence the private interests take of over the managerial system, under the pretext of efficiency but then mutate over time into a process creaming off large wedges of the taxpayer’s money. Once done, we are in a system that cannot be undone, as in the US. A good standard of primary care will be sacrificed, just as in the US, and replaced with a plethora of specialist providers of mid range service providers which are not actually well quality monitored and get away with a great deal of ethically dubious practice.
It should be fully understood that the managerial systems in the US are grossly wasteful, riddled with incompetence and continually duplicates effort as the communication between health providers and insurance companies is impossibly complex. It is very prone to systemic abuse which is very difficult or impossible to detect, or even if detected nearly impossible to reverse without destructive energy sapping legal manoeuvres.v
In fact the various players in this travesty are remarkably inept, clumsy and transparent but we shouldn’t forget that the process was initiated under nulabour.
Surely there will come a time of reckoning. And it won’t be pretty.
To be fair most private firms wouldn’t piss £14 billion down the drain for a computer system that doesn’t work.
Dr John Lister is a good man. He has been fighting privatisation in the NHS for some time. This is from last year.
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http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/732/defending-the-nhs-against-privatisation-john-lister-talks-to-london-progressive-journal-part-two
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Dr John Lister is the Information Director of London Health Emergency (LHE). Founded in the autumn of 1983, LHE is the country’s biggest and longest-running pressure group in defence of the NHS.
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Dr Lister is also an Associate Senior Lecturer in Health Journalism at Coventry University and is the author of numerous publications on the topic of health policy. His latest book The NHS after 60: for patients or profits? was published in 2008.
“To be fair most private firms wouldn’t piss £14 billion down the drain for a computer system that doesn’t work.”
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To be fair they will not have too. There won`t be anyone on anykind of welfare after the three main parties have finished with us. The only computer system the private firms will have will be a direct one to your bank.
The success of these measures isn’t an issue that anyone cares about in the long run – all that matters is the transfer of funds and the ultimate ‘gratitude’ shown to the politicians involved.
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There used to be a time when public opinion at least moderated such things, but that time is long past. The motto of all parties these days is ‘ching-ching and to hell with the electorate’…
“The idea that siphoning off public money as profit for capitalists will improve the NHS is obvious rubbish.”
You have that right. But it improves the profits of the people who own the Libs Labs and Cons.
And there is really no alternative because those who object to siphoning profits to political insiders fail to understand that the alternative to a monopolistic public health service with an overpaid and incompetently managed work force is not monopolistic public health service with the overpaid menial staff replaced by contract workers with the difference in salaries going to the intermediaries, i.e., the Blairite solution (as described in Polly Filla’s book “Hard work life in low pay Britain), but private healthcare, period.
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Sadly, Britain is so far down the collectivist road that the idea that people might take responsibility for the important things in life such as their children’s education and their health is beyond most people’s comprehension.
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The only thing people are now generally deemed qualified to decide for themselves is what to spend on lottery tickets, cigarettes, beer and airline flights to Mai-orca, wherever that may be.
Is there something going on we should know about ?
http://www.neurope.eu/article/radiation-elevated-over-europe
Strange that Mary – My black Lab Tilly (1YR) has just chewed my Nokia, ate the keypad and cracked the screen -she is now in the dog-house. I really should have bought her more less expensive toys to play with.
First NHS hospital gets privatised; no mention of Tory interests
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/11/10/first-nhs-hospital-gets-privatised-no-mention-of-tory-links/
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As Labour MP Jamie Reed tweeted last night:
Former Tory Health team member Mark Simmonds MP is also a paid strategic advisor with Circle. Coincidence?
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And then added:
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Two of Circle’s major shareholders are Tory Party donors. Coincidence?
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In fact, emails released to the Guardian (by SpinWatch) in July this year showed Circle was part of a lobby group that took the NHS regulator to expensive gala dinners.
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In January 2010 the Telegraph revealed that Andrew Lansley was ‘bankrolled by private healthcare provider
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Guest. If true, and it is the IAEA reporting, then dangerous. Iodine 131 is used in nuclear medicine to treat an overactive thyroid gland and acts on it by ablating it.
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http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=radioiodine
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Where I worked in a Nuclear Medicine department, patients with the disease were given the dose orally and remained in isolation for three days. All their waste products had to be collected and they had to avoid contact with members of their families especially children for a specific period afterwards.
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Mark That is strange. Hope she is OK. Is there something in the air? My dog’s behaviour was out of character. She is a rescue dog and you never really know their full history. Tilly and Lily!
Apart from the customary trip to Israel with the Conservative Friends of Israel, Simon Burns who announced this Circle takeover of Hinchingbrooke Hospital, frequently visits Qatar to attend a series of conferences entitled ‘Conference of Democracy and Security’?? Also Bahrain and the UAE, China including Hong Kong, India and the US. Much travelling.
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http://www.theyworkforyou.com/regmem/?p=10079
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When announcing the takeover, he said:
Hinchingbrooke hospital will continue to deliver the same NHS services, +++as long as commissioners continue to purchase them+++, adhering to the key NHS principle of care being free at the point of use. This is not a privatisation in any shape or form.
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Let’s wait and see. By then of course it will be too late.
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The short debate is here. More like his announcement and others’ comments.
{http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2011-11-10a.443.0&s=speaker%3A10079#g443.2}
Liz Kendall the Shadow Health Minister, who replied to him is a feisty young woman.
Why don’t chunks of the NHS go for the mutual option? That would be cool. No management experience I suppose. The most worrying aspect of this particular privatisation is that it was set up by Tessa Jowell.
It would seem the NHS has been fattened up for many a year now ready for the oncoming slaughter of privatisation. It was inevitable that this big beast would be slain eventually, but best done in small bite sized digestible chunks. The Nu-lab led increase in the number of extra administrators, managers and other non-job facilitators is well known, this is the fat from the belly that could easily be cut-off by private owners. A hospital is a very manually intensive operation and those on the factory floor have already been effectively privatised. Sooner or later the medical staff will be on the operating table too as their salaries are rather a big over-head, ripe for harvesting. Sooner or later though I believe life-saving measures had to be taken for the NHS as it’s ongoing costs are open ended as people live longer, populations increase and interventions that at one time would have been considered cosmetic are becoming the norm, gastric banding being one example. Mary, maybe such a device could be fitted to your dog Lily, that’d teach her to go helping herself to the larder.
The James Paget hospital in Gorleston, after a string of unidentified complaints against its chairman, who finally resigned after three days, last week, got a new chairman/placeman. he hasn’t got a clue of running a hospital, but he ran the EDP for over ten years, an Archant group Tory rag, so he thinks he’s qualified.
He is being placed to ready the James Paget and some other 13 hospitals on the brink, for the same Hinchinbrook treatment. This eyewash, should we have an election today, would be copied by Labour, wholesale, not because its their prefered position, but because they can get away with it, just as they copied and accepted the initial first round of PFI instalments staring in in Durham and Norwich.
At the next election they will try and make out that they have saved the NHS, that they have brought MRSA down, etc.
To change the NHS into something more affordable for the country does not mean we have to adopt the outrageously expensive US private healthcare system, coporatised and exclusive to many peopleon low and medium incomes. There are different systems available in Holland France and Germany that work well, but have a voluntary contribution attached.
once again the sole orientation to a decrepid US policy system is being applied willy nilly.
This post is somewhat off topic but relates to Craig’s previous post. It is, I think, very important and I would be grateful if Mary and the other intrepid investigators would look into Mofat.
It began about a month ago when I was dismissed from a prominent University in Australia after 22 years as a full Professor on the flimsiest of excuses. As I stated to one of my current PhD students (an Iranian medical doctor) “My personal strife began around 2005 when we had a Jewish Italian visiting speaker and his wife to dinner at my house. They had recently visited Germany and stated how wonderful it was to visit the newly opened Holocaust Memorial in the centre of Berlin. My wife (who is German) said that she was utterly disgusted with this huge symbol of Jewish supremacy in the German capital: she was born after the war which ended 60 years before this monstrosity was built, and she, and most living Germans had nothing to do with anything that the Nazi’s might have done. Etc. And I totally supported her. Eventually our visitors left in a rage.
Shortly afterwards my troubles began with attempts to take away some of my office space etc & I also noticed that some people were no longer contacting me & that – for some journals – I was finding it impossible to publish, for spurious reasons. A Jewish friend told me that I had probably been put on a secret academic blacklist (Mofet, I believe). And, in the end, they won. So, whether or nor this relates to the discrimination against you and other muslims I have no idea but these people are very powerful throughout English-speaking academia.”
In part, she replied “About the Mofet thing, I had heard a lot about it when I was in Iran, but no one was directly affected by it, as the entire country was under sanction for the things we had not done. But that is another story. I have heard a lot about them, and how they can basically turn over your entire life. That is because they have money and power. Besides, they are winging all the time and accusing people for an exaggeration of an event happening over 60 years ago now. During the second world war over 12 million people of my country were killed because the British, Russian, French and Americans occupied our country to prevent any support to the Germans. They stole all the food and people, civil people died of hunger. But no one is talking about this story at all, because Iran does not have the money or the power, or is not in the interest of special people to have these types of information circulating. It has been like that always, and it is not the first time they are working against other people. They have put all their effort in ruining Christianity and Islam, and even being humane. And they have been somehow successful too. The history is full of stories in ruining other people’s lives one way or another and mostly by their religious leaders too.”
So there we are. A Mofet blacklist well known in Iran but virtually unheard of in the West because of press censorship.
I urge people to look into this. I have lost my job in consequence, but other than the loss of the capacity to pursue my research interests, this is of little importance since I am already 64. However – I am certain – they are using me for target practice is an ongoing threat for all and any that might question Jewish supremacy.
Lansley’s ideas are Treasury-driven, in my opinion. They are motivated by off-balance-sheet accounting, just as the private finance initiative was. The fact that it is hopeless, won’t work, can’t work, will cost more, provide a worse service, and nobody believes in it is all irrelevant. Look at a minor scandal like school lunches if you want to see what will happen. The amount of money available for the actual good, the lunches, has become smaller, while the profit is guaranteed.
Iodine 131 doesn’t occur in nature so if it’s in the air we put it there. More at this website, which is generally worth watching.
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http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/11/radioactive-iodine-detected-in-wide.html
Ex Academic. Very sorry that your tenure was taken from you. I do not know anything of Mofat (Spelling?) but do know of course of the existence of the very powerful Israel lobby in Australia and of their attempt to shut down Australians for Palestine and their campaigns.
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This article outlines the actions used against two academics. I will keep looking. Best wishes.
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http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/israel-lobby-sets-its-sights-on-academe/story-e6frg6so-1111112618594
Coming to the UK soon.
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Richard Horton (Editor Lancet) has asked whether anyone is looking at the effect of the economic crisis on health and health care in Greece, in light of the adverse health effects of previous recessions. Here, we describe changes in health and health care in Greece on the basis of our analysis of data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, which provide comparable cross-sectional and longitudinal information on social and economic characteristics and living conditions throughout the EU.
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10 October 2011
Health effects of financial crisis: omens of a Greek tragedy
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2961556-0/fulltext
Fascism embedding itself nicely in the Greek section of NuEurope now run by bankers with the assistance of ex? thugs apparently.
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http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2011/11/12/far-right-thug-with-an-axe-becomes-the-new-minister-of-infrastructure-in-greece/
Off topic, sorry.
Ex-academic:
I found one tenuous connection (via a loony site, but cited as originating from the Israel Project, whose website is currently down). Asher Naim. Apparently this guy, whose email is (xxx)@mofet.il is available for hasbara service. His area is Jewish refugees from Arab states. Allegedly.
Mofet itself appears to be an Israeli educational, and more particularly teacher-training foundation. What it is doing outside Israel,if anything, is not clear.
Ex Academic (O/T in reply)
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No such black-list exists I believe, the only list that came to my attention was one described to me by my father, who was a Masonic officer. That was an Anglo/American ‘black-list’ of academics thought unsuitable by their peers/elders/others for the consideration of honourary degree or a degree honoris causa.
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Recently the American radical Tony Kushner was blacklisted by CUNY and a precedence was set in that his honourary degree decision was overturned:
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http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/301/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6724
It all comes down to core functions – the core function of a commercial entity operating in the marketplace is quite straightforward, maximise profit, minimise loss. The core function of the NHS is the well-being of the people of Britain. You can see right away how these are diametrically opposed. Oh, I`m sure that some eager, dead-eyed, pro-market propagandist would insist that private sector health companies provide high-quality healthcare. Perfectly true, except that such provision is not provided on the basis of need.
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Because the market, or rather companies operating in the market, do not respond to need or desire, but to buying power. And that is what stealth-privatised sectors of the NHS will now start to do, skew their operations towards areas of health which will maximise return for investors. That’s what the Lansley reforms are all about – not patient care or efficiency, but market-driven ideology.
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But they have overreached, as all greedmongers do when convinced that the gods are with them. So when, eventually, the boot is on the other foot we should not be reticent or reluctant to push back, and push back hard.