The tories have no mandate for this. They lied about their support of the health system before the election and the public, as poll after poll has show (despite attempts by the sleazy tories to suppress those polls are very satidied with the NHS.

There is no need to launch into another massive upheaval at the same time that we are seeing massive upheavals in many other areas of govt. But the tories do not have to votes on their own for this. It is all up to the Liberal Democrats. I don’t trust Clegg at all, but if they vote for this shit they will never be taken seriously again. Of course Clegg won’t care because he is a closet tory all along.

Quite simple: the speech was aimed at blue rinse Tory supporters. The more the Health Bill is in the News the more people start to question why. That is now affecting the Tory core vote. Cameron is not stupid. He knows that if the core vote choose not to vote then even the pathetic support Ed Miliband can muster (and it is pathetic, let’s admit it) could lead to a Labour landslide.

The disquiet that you mention is from the core vote in the shires. The blue rinse Tories are worried, especially since there is real talk of rationing, and at a level that has not occurred since the 90s. The rationing, of course, is occurring at completely the wrong time: during a recession when people feel that they do not have the spare cash for something they assume that the state would pay for.

Cameron’s speech avoided mentioning healthcare rationing (see my False Economy blog: this is where a substantial part of the cuts will occur). But everyone knows that is what we are in for. His speech was to reassure those Tory voters (you can tell by the patronising way he spoke down to the audience, by the way he shamelessly exploited his family). If he gives another one in a couple of weeks time then we will know that he’s not getting through.

@2. Richard Blogger: “The rationing, of course, is occurring at completely the wrong time: during a recession when people feel that they do not have the spare cash for something they assume that the state would pay for.”

Health care rationing is normal. The NHS does not have infinite funds, so there will always be patients who are untreated for the least serious problems. The NHS is not isotropic; experts cluster together, so patients may have to travel for the best care.

So the argument about a new regime of rationing is false; rationing has always applied in the NHS. The debate should be about how we ration.

And we should be honest about the post code lottery. In some cases, bad patient results (deaths) are the result of bad practice; good patient results (increased longevity) often occur in a cluster of experts; disseminating the knowledge from a cluster of experts is better in the long run than disseminating experts.

This is an interesting article I saw posted elsewhere, here’s an excerpt.

As their expansion slows in the United States, MCOs predictably will continue to enter new markets abroad. Investors view the opening of managed care in Latin America as a lucrative business opportunity. As public-sector services and social security funds are cut back, privatized, and reorganized under managed care, with the support of international lending agencies, the effects of these reforms on access to preventive and curative services will hold great importance throughout the third world.

Ideologically, there is an attempt to forge a new “common sense” which will become a socially shared truth. Many of those referred to as experts in the healthcare environment contribute to the construction of this new common sense by promoting the following eleven fundamentals from which to rethink the system:

1. the crisis in health stems from financial causes;

2. management introduces a new and indispensable administrative rationality to resolve the crisis;

3. clinical decisions should be subordinated to this new rationality if cost control is desired;

4.efficiency increases if financing is separated from service delivery, and if competition is generalized among all subsectors (state, social security, and private);

5. the market in health should be developed because it is the best regulator of quality and costs;

6. demand rather than supply should be subsidized;

7. making labor relationships flexible is the best mechanism to achieve efficiency, productivity, and quality;

8. private administration is more efficient and less corrupt than public administration;

9. payments for social security are each worker’s property;

10. deregulation of social security allows the user freedom of choice, to be able to opt for the best administrator of his or her funds;

11. the transition of the user/patient/beneficiary to client/consumer assures that rights are respected.

These ideological claims represent a profound reconstruction of common sense. Diagnoses that speak of inefficiency in the management of state institutions and social security, of shortages in resources that restrict access, of excessive bureaucratization, of limited capacity to respond to the population’s demands, of escalating costs—all become self-evident truths increasingly shared by users and healthcare workers as part of their lived experiences. They are then turned into justifications for reform proposals. This makes possible the transformation of common sense concerning the processes of health, illness, and services—little by little, making the commercialization of all the relationships established in these processes appear natural. Assumptions that were sustained during many years, especially for public health advocates, and that conveyed the idea that the health was a state responsibility and a public good, have given way to the “complex” discourses of privatization, economic restructuring, and fiscal conservatism. Would-be progressives often come to accept these discourses even while trying to distance themselves from the neoliberal project.

Against these discourses, it is important to show that such interpretations do not constitute truth, but rather the imposition of views defined by financial interests. Reform, as sought by official discourses, is not the only option, nor the best, from the perspective of a population’s health. Many groups are working on alternative projects which defend health as a public good. These movements are stronger in some Latin American countries than in others. Similar movements have begun in Africa and Asia. Increasingly, this struggle is being recognized not only as a class struggle, but also as a part of the struggle against imperialism—which has now taken on the new guise of rescuing third-world countries from rising healthcare costs and inefficient bureaucracies through the imposition of neoliberal managed-care solutions exported from the United States. In this realm, as in many others, the need for international solidarity among those resisting the logic of the global system is paramount.

I forgot to include the link for the article I mentioned.

https://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/05/16/cameron-attacked-from-all-sides-on-nhs-plans/

I messed that up as well ffs, can’t we have an edit on here. One last time here’s the link I apologise for the cock up.

http://monthlyreview.org/2000/05/01/how-the-united-states-exports-managed-care-to-third-worldcountries

Did anyone else see the speech yesterday? I picked up on a phrase Cameron used (again) which demonstrates to me how the man thinks.

“the NHS is important to me and my family”

Cameron is so entrenched in self interest that he thinks the best way to persuade us all that the NHS is close to his heart – is by implying that it’s personally important to him.
This is how Tories think – it’s me first, everyone else second. he couldn’t persuade us by stating “it’s important” or “it’s important to everyone” because in the Tory world this is meaningless and must be a lie – no he has to imply that it’s in his self interest to support the NHS – which of course means he’s telling the truth (in his party’s eyes anyway)