Why it’s sick to profit from our ill health

Published: 27 January, 2011

• DAVID Cameron says that his health reforms are about lives and efficiency. 

At the same time, and as Blair goes to Chilcot’s  Iraq Inquiry, Cameron’s government is responsible for spending the equivalent of 125 new NHS hospitals per year on an inefficient occupation and war, incurring death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We need a health system that meets health needs, not one that places our health in the hands of private businesses, that involves spending £2billion pounds to place our health needs into the market, and hence possibly into the hands of private companies, intent on making a profit from our ill health. Individual GPs are not trained in, nor should they spend their time on, management; again placing our health service at risk.

Meanwhile we are suffering massive cutbacks in mental health provision as local primary care trusts attempt to place a disproportionate burden of health cuts on mental health services. One third of mental health beds are being cut in my local PCT, who are also massively reducing what they call low-priority treatments, including tonsillectomies, hysterectomies and, of course, as with the last Tory government, grommet insertions.

We need money to be spent on health, not death, on public services, not private profit.

Don’t make a casualty of our NHS! 

SHIRLEY FRANKLIN
Chair, Defend the Whittington Hospital Coalition
www.dwhc.org.uk