The IOW Save our NHS group is just one of many who have signed a letter being delivered to Professor Stephen Hawking at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in Cambridge today (Tuesday).
The letter is one of thanks for Professor Hawking’s talk earlier this month at the Royal Society of Medicine in which he stated the current NHS and social care ‘crisis’ is due to political choice.
The letter to Professor Hawking reads,
We would like to congratulate Professor Stephen Hawking for making it clear in his talk at the Royal Society of Medicine on 19th August that the current NHS and social care ‘crisis’ is due to political choice.
We wholeheartedly thank him and recommend all campaigners and NHS Staff follow his example, call out the situation clearly and demand an end to corporate control of the NHS and a return to a fully publicly funded, owned, managed and provided NHS, as the NHS (Reinstatement) Bill proposes.
Prof. Hawking rightly says:
“We see the balance of power in the UK is with private healthcare companies, and the direction of change is towards a US-style insurance system.”
We thank Professor Hawking for bringing this to public attention and for creating an opportunity for truthful public debate about the demise of the NHS, that many campaigners are fighting hard to prevent.
The NHS in England has been fragmented into 44 so-called Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships with a collective mission to cut health and social care services by around £24bn by 2020/21, compared to current spending levels.
Each STP is under instruction to move towards becoming an Accountable Care Organisation – an entity with no statutory basis in NHS legislation.
Encompassing a number of health and social care organisations – potentially both public and private sector – these organisations would carry the risk of providing hospital, community and primary care services to a designated population on the basis of a fixed contract that would be set at a level that required them to “manage demand”.
Accountable Care Organisations would use value-for-money criteria to limit access to so- called elective care; so this would be denied to patients that represented poor value for money, eg in terms of “quality of life years” after treatment.
The outcome would be as Professor Hawking has described: the creation of a two-tier health service: one private for those who can afford it, with the NHS as a version of the US Medicare/Medicaid system for the rest of us.
Our task as citizens is to scrap the Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships and reinstate the NHS as a comprehensive, universal, publicly owned, funded, provided and run service that is free at the point of clinical need to anyone.
Signed by:
999 Call for the NHS
999 Call Calderdale & Kirklees
999 Call North East
Fighting 4 Life Lincolnshire
Norfolk NHS Action group
Keep Our NHS Public
Hands Off Bedford Hospital
Keep the Horton General
Support the NHS Halstead
Wirral Defend Our NHS
Hands off Hinchingbrooke
North Kirklees Support the NHS
Junior Doctors Alliance
Fighting 4 Hartlepool Hospital
Protect Chorley & South Ribble from Cuts & Privatisation
Support Stafford Hospital
Hands Off HRI (Huddersfield)
Public Matters
Isle of Wight Save Our NHS
Hampshire & Isle of Wight Defend the NHS
Keep Our NHS Public Swindon
Unity March
Doctors in Unite
Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign
Keep Our St Helier Hospital (KOSHH)
Save Our NHS march
The letter is shared below via Christine Lightbody of the IOW Save our NHS group. You can join them on a march on the Island in September.
Image: lwpkommunikacio under CC BY 2.0
