Ballot box the way to solve NHS madness

DOES anyone still believe that the NHS is safe in Tory hands? Almost every day yet more news comes to light proving it isn’t.

It has been reported that the right-wing think tank Initiative for Free Trade has called on ministers to allow USA companies to compete with the NHS to run UK hospitals. The fact that American companies are queuing to get their hands on our clinical care and hospitals is hardly news, however. The same goes for the expansion of American health insurance businesses here.

I’m sure no one is naive enough to believe that all Jeremy Hunt’s trips to the States when he was health secretary were to Disneyworld.

The Western Daily Press reports that “gut related” surgery will no longer take place at Cheltenham General Hospital (September 22), meaning that in future Gloucester Royal will be the only hospital in the county carrying out such procedures (anyone remember exactly this happening with bone-related injuries late last year?).

The assurances that this is simply in order to streamline and improve care should fool no one. We’ve seen a constant contraction of our hospital services, with some of our local hospitals closed and clinical services drastically cut in those that have so far survived.

To misquote Gertrude Stein, “a cut is a cut is a cut”.

In the letters section on the same day, Robert Readman recounts his woes with the NHS’s chronically incompetent hospital appointments service. I sympathise, having had similar experiences; but I’d also point out that like so many other services ‘within’ the NHS, the appointments service is actually privately run. Privately, expensively and very badly.

So much of our NHS has already been privatised by stealth.

The privatisation of the NHS is part and parcel of the hard-line Conservative vision of all public services ending up in corporate hands. Brexit will simply help open the floodgates to predatory American companies wanting their pound or ten of ever increasingly corporatised health service flesh – and no sane person would ever wish an American-style health system on anyone.

There is a way to halt this madness – at the ballot box.

Paul Halas Stroud, Gloucestershire