Skipper

With the NHS Bill at a critical stage it's interesting to see the forces lined up agin it. The Daily Telegraph kicked off a few days back with an article addressed to the shedload of doctors- 365 actually- asserting that it:

"threatens to derail and fragment the NHS into a collection of competing private providers," resulting in "hundreds of different organisations pulling against each other leading to fragmentation, chaos and damage to the quality and availability of patient care."

A Royal College of General Practitioners survey showed 90% of GPs opposed to the Bill. An Independent poll of NHS staff also produced a big majority against: in this case, 71% and a Nursing Times editorial condemned it as 'an unholy mess'.

In a BMJ piece last month Professor Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine had this to say:

"[it] threatens to derail and fragment the NHS into a collection of competing private providers," resulting in "hundreds of different organisations pulling against each other leading to fragmentation, chaos and damage to the quality and availability of patient care...."I have tried very hard, as have some of my cleverer colleagues, but no matter how hard we try, we always end up concluding that the bill means something quite different from what the secretary of state says it does."

Finally, though i could go on, here's Clare Gerada, Chair of that Royal College of GPs on the Today programme:

"I think the essence is this Bill is a burden. It makes no sense. It’s incoherent to anybody other than the lawyers. It won’t deal with the big issues that we have to deal with such as the aging population and dementia. It will result in a very expensive health service and it will also result in a health service that certainly will never match the health service that we have at the moment or at least had 12 months ago."

With this degree of opposition, it seems absurd that this cack-handed abortion of a reform should go ahead to wreak untold harm on the most cost effective health system in the world.