Dr Paul Hobday Dr Bob Gill, Anna Atow (NHS Surgeon Retired)
Thank you for listening to our first podcast on this important and imminent threat to England’s National Health Service (NHS). The bedrock of the British health service has been its well established, easily accessible primary care. Individuals or groups of family doctors working in practices covering the whole country and accessible to all, funded through general taxation and without cost barriers, has provided, since 1948, world-leading medical service to the population. In recent years this has been undermined by consecutive governments re-purposing provision along the lines of the American private insurance model, without democractic mandate or public awareness.
State-funded insurance pools known as Clinical Commisioning Groups created by 2012 Health and Social Care Act, having served their function of destabilising NHS Hospital providers through commissioning and outsourcing services to a plethora of corporate players and normalised commercial practices, are now mutating into Health Maintenance Organisations (HMO). As part of the confuse and conceal tactic of the privatisation lobby have devised a series of acronyms including ACOs, ACSs and the latest ICP or Integrated Care Providers. ICPs are, make no mistake, derived from HMOs. Far from being like the NHS – healthcare based on need, not the ability to pay – Michael Moore revealed (from Nixon’s audio archive) in his 2007 film ‘Sicko’, the business model for HMOs:
“all the incentives are towards less medical care because the less care they give them [patients] the more money they [providers] make”
With the pertetual chaos and distraction of BREXIT as cover, fundamental changes are being sneaked through without public or health professional awareness let alone understanding.
Dr Bob Gill, producer of The Great NHS Heist and family doctor, speaks to Anna Athow, retired NHS surgeon and Dr Paul Hobday, retired NHS family doctor about these destructive changes which will result in a down-skilled workforce increasing clinical risk and financially incentivised to deny care to patient and performance managed to ensure compliance. A journey from social solidarity to corporate dystopia.
Further reading
- https://calderdaleandkirklees999callforthenhs.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/large-scale-integrated-primary-care-networks-what-lurks-beneath-the-buzz-words/
- https://calderdaleandkirklees999callforthenhs.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/please-urgently-help-to-annul-the-dept-of-healths-stealth-changes-to-legislation-about-how-gps-work/
- https://calderdaleandkirklees999callforthenhs.wordpress.com/2019/03/01/new-nhs-primary-legislation-local-health-services-for-local-people/
