|
Britain Crisis of the National Health System Workers' Weekly denounced the diversionary discussion and demanded that the NHS fulfill its original purpose to look after the health needs of the population rather than the corporate-led direction that is wrecking the NHS and jeopardizing its future.[1] The bill was first announced under the Theresa May government, Workers' Weekly pointed out. It states that the government commits to increase investment in the NHS in the years up to and including 2024. This will result in a £33.9 billion increase in cash terms by 2023/24, with total NHS England spending rising to £148.5 billion in 2024. The King's Fund, the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation responded that an annual increase of the NHS funding should be at least four per cent a year rather than the average of 3.4 per cent a year proposed by the government. This line of argument was taken up by the Opposition in Parliament as well. Workers' Weekly writes: "This may or may not be the case, but it does not address the present chronic lack of trained medical and nursing staff and the loss of NHS services going back over decades, as many critics have pointed out. Nor does it challenge the direction in which the NHS is being taken, its privatization, the contracting out of services, and even more fundamentally whether the government's approach resolves the crisis in NHS funding.
The total incapacity of the British medical
system to deal with the COVID-19 crisis is proof
enough that the funding provided by the government
would not safeguard the future of the NHS and
neither is it intended to. "Even the claim that a
'mandatory' funding by government gives some
funding 'security' to the NHS is false when it is
combined with a neo-liberal corporate direction
that the 'NHS Long-Term Plan' represents. The 'NHS
Long-Term Plan' is already reducing safe access to
vital emergency, children, maternity and mental
health services for whole swathes of the
population. It is being further pursued in the
present deconstruction of local District Hospital
acute services with a massive loss of acute and
long term care hospital beds and local GP services
across England. This is the 'long-term plan' to
switch funding into an 'integrated' Care Providers
and systems that government intends to be
predominately dominated by the private sector
companies," Workers' Weekly wrote. Note
|
The National
Health System (NHS) in Britain is in a profound
crisis which the government, opposition parties
and media disinformation do everything possible to
obscure. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit
Britain with a vengeance, a diversionary
discussion over how the NHS should be funded
accompanied the British government's January 15
"mandatory" NHS Funding Bill 2019-20. The
government stated that the additional funding
would be spent by NHS England in the "NHS
Long-Term Plan."
"What is
being obscured is that health care is a claim of
all on the economy which the people must make.
Health workers provide vital and accessible health
services to all and in doing so create value in
the socialized economy by curing people when sick
and injured and keeping healthy the human
resources of society and all those who live and
work in it. This value is consumed by big
corporations in employing the labour power of a
healthy workforce. This is value which should not
be expropriated by these corporations but should
be claimed by the government and their health
services as value that can then be used to
resource a fully-funded NHS. The Bill does not
raise this vital question of the role the NHS
plays in a human-centred economy where the NHS
should become a human-centred system paid for at
least out of the value it creates in the economy
so that any extra funding contributes to meeting
the needs of health care for all."
