Beware of lasting damage to our health service

Published: 5 August, 2010

• GRADUALLY the details about the proposed redesign of our health service are emerging.

Dr Jacky Davis’s comments (Forum, July 15), give further cause for concern.

Perhaps, at last, patients and prospective patients (that is, all of us) will wake up to the fragmentation and lasting damage being imposed on our health service, without prior warning or careful field studies of the changes.

The plans were not in either of the coalition partners’ manifestos.

There is a strangely confident belief in the efficacy of private companies, despite the lessons that should have been learned about the banks’ and private sector’s behaviour in other sectors of our national life.

In America private companies – both medical and drug providers – have pushed up costs hugely; yet strongly resisted efforts to provide cover for the almost 40 million people with no insurance.

In Britain, the government collects money to fund the health service, from taxes and National Insurance.

Consequently it can hand over large sums to all sorts of interested, private, companies from a central fund if it so chooses.

Why does it choose to?

How many of the decision-makers have private health insurance already?

A PATTON
Spencer Rise, NW5