First up from Professor Chris Ham, a former government adviser and Birmingham University heath expert:
"Health is the most important service devolved governments have power over."
Second from Michael Summers, vice chair of the Patients Association:
"England - for some reason - seems to have been the poor relation."
As the report says, the devolution experiment has wrecked the concept of one health system delivering exactly the same treatment to every citizen in the UK...we now intead have, to all intents and purposes, "four different NHS systems operating in the UK".
Yes, free health care theoretically still exists for every British citizen, but how it is delivered will vary depending in which part of the UK you’re living, e.g. in Scotland patients enjoy free personal care (unlike the means-tested systems in elsewhere),in Wales there are free prescriptions.
Nye Bevan's National Health Service is now dead, killed off by the constitutional vandals from his very own party.
How ironic then that one of the arguments Labour MPs are making against a European Union plan to enable all EU citizens to obtain medical care anywhere elsewhere in the EU is that it may lead to an "internal market" for health and ultimately the destruction of the National Health Service.
In the event of this proposal being approved, will we see England’s sick, inform and elderly availing themselves of this "internal market for health" and flooding across the Scottish and Welsh borders?
Let's hope so.
1 comment:
More likely they'd have to go to France. As was seen with the university fees, it's OK for the Scots to discriminate against British nationals previously resident outside Scotland, but not against EU nationals previously resident outside Scotland.
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