Ok, I should not pass judgement until the end of the celebrations and events planned for this week!

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We should phase out any costs for prescriptions and tests etc. This would also be good politics, as it would force the Conservatives to justify their supposedly 'liberal' side.

The NHS IS Labour. Tony Wright made a passionate defence of the NHS in Parliament today. He rightly described how the Tories and the BMA have been in a coalition to slowly dismantle the NHS for 60 years now.
The GP's aren't concerned about patients, they're concerned about their businesses.

I'm most concerned about what we should do about dentistry. As well as the extra 78,000 nurses and 30,000 doctors, we need extra dentists. I favour increasing pay for the NHS workers.

However, I think we need competition to preserve universal healthcare. I hate PFI. It has been a direct cause of infection, as private contractors have cut around the corners of cleaning. It takes huge chunks out of funding for beds, bedpans etc.

But, there is a big difference between the Tories health vouchers, and picking up the full tab for some ops. If you can afford half of the costs of a £4000 op., the Tories promised at the last election to subsidise the other half. But, if a poorer person needs an operation, even if it means sending them to a private hospital, we should subsidise the whole costs.

Labour has on some levels undermined private companies. Remember, we have always had private involvements. Bevan had to compromise, and allow some hospitals to have private clinics to treat the rich in a much better way, and he allowed GP's to run their practises like businesses. But before 1997, consultants would deliberately flood the waiting lists to drive patients into the arms of private companies. This no longer happens. The BMA constantly complains about this.

A market isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is hypocrasy. The government has been accused of scrambling to make cuts when they close certain wards and clinics and hospitals. It was because no matter how much funding given to them, the services weren't very good. Other hospitals and clinics were operating much better in the area. But competition has actually allowed us to talk about funding per patient, which for all the Tories incoherent ramblings decentralises power. If I can see that out of 5 hospitals, some private, some public, that one is particuarly better, I know which one I want to choose. Rather than the Tories plan to subsidise BUPA and the middle-class, this could make a real difference to poorer people.

But, remember, this won't happen often. The NHS is so good now, that subsidies to the private hospitals would slowly wither away. And the government has decided to beef up funding and power for NICE, which will see co-payments slowly withering away.

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Oh e10rifles we are destined to disagree about almost everything aren't we, except I hope that Labour whould continue to win elections.

You are so stuck in the 1980s that you probably know Gene Hunt personally.

Let's take them one by one shall we. 

The internal market has, er, been abolished.  It was abolished soon after that nasty Mr Blair became Prime Minister.  What we have now is a system whereby PCTs plan health services and then buy them off providers on behalf of their local population.  These providers are hospitals, GPs, dentists and primary and public health professionals.  They then make sure there is enough information about these services in the public domain to allow patients choice about where to go for treatment, because despite the best attempts of those who oppose the concept of darwinism, we are not all the same, we do things differently, we have different skills and needs.  In fact, we quite like to get (and provide) services that are about what we need and can deliver rather than what a man in an office in Central London tells an Asian family in Blackpool they need.

Bring all subcontracts back in house.  Ah yes, the call of the Left since time immemorial.  Are you sure.  Rubbish disposal?  Running car parks?  Providing canteens for the staff?  All things that public sector managers have close to their hearts.  You may have an argument abouts some services - cleaning perhaps - but all - please do sit back and think for a minute.

End PFI buildings for hospitals.  There are now 150 new hospitals in the NHS since Labour came to power.  We used to have an NHS estate where the vast majority was built before the NHS.  This is no longer the case, in just 10 years Labour has transformed the NHS estate actually building hospitals where the trolleys fit down corridors, where people can have single rooms for privacy, where the floors do not have awkward little joins where MRSA can clog, where the ceilings are high enough for modern medical machines.  To do this from the public purse in one lump sum would have meant no increase in staff, no staff payrises, no new drugs, in fact no trebling of NHS resources.  Buildings or nurses?  you make your choices you take your chances I suppose.

Make prescriptions free?  Over 80% of prescriptions in this country are free.  Those that are not are paid for by those who can afford them.  To do this would cost £430m a year.  And would, in the same instance as taking  that money out of the NHS, do that thing you say you hate, move money from the poor who benefit from the reinvestment of this money, to those who can afford to pay (as they have since 1950 by the way so hardly a new Labour invention) by putting yet more money in the pockets of those you want to tax more.  Urrgh?

Get rid of foundation trusts.  Foundation trusts are the ultimate example of passing power from the top to the people. Over 1 million people are members of foundation trusts and the numbers grow every day.  These are local people who can elect their own representatives to the boards of their local hospitals or mental health trusts.  You really want to take that away in favour of our man in Whitehall?

And we save the best for last, more money for staff.  NHS staff salaries have risen faster and further than any other public professionals in the country since Labour agreed Agenda for Change with all the health unions that fundamentally restructured the pay scales.  They have also just agreed a three year deal which gives them a higher first year deal than any other public sector group of workers.  We would all like to pay nurses more.  Not sure we want to pay GPs and consultants more, but you might.  But the pay for those who make the NHS tick has been one of the great success stories of this government.

Lets just concentrate, as Lord Darzi has suggested, on allowing doctors and nurses to provide the care they see fit, and allow patients to choose where they go for that care.

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