THE HAEMORRHAGING STATE OF UK HEALTHCARE

Nurses, junior doctors and now consultants have been voting for strike action for months and it’s not just about pay, it’s about working conditions, because they can see for themselves how the NHS is bleeding to death.

Tories have for years been privatising the NHS around its edges, refusing to listen to staff who have, for years, been complaining that wages have not kept pace with inflation. Tories seem more than happy to watch as fewer and fewer dentists continue to offer NHS treatments, offering only private appointments, or packing up altogether and quitting Britain to practise overseas. And if something is not done soon, we are going to have a new generation with rotten teeth because parents cannot afford private dentistry on top of all the other rising cost of living pressures.

Back to the crisis in hospitals. A consultant in the UK gets paid an average of about 110,000 pounds a year, and more if he undertakes unsociable hours work.

Compare that to the salary of an MP who gets 87,000 pounds basic plus allowances and all manner of perks. Now ask yourself, who is more valuable to society, an MP or a doctor who is saving a life or relieving someone’s pain every day? How dare these miserable MPs deny a sensible salary increase to doctors while they are so generously paid.

It is an absolute nonsense that a doctor can earn double his or her salary by crossing the border into Southern Ireland, or to work in Canada, Australia or New Zealand.

A few years ago, the NHS was attracting staff from abroad. Now Britain is haemorrhaging staff to overseas countries at an ever-increasing rate.

Personally, I would like to see an end to private hospitals, private nursing homes, private dentistry and doctors allowed to have private patients.

Oh yes, taxes would have to go up to pay for it, but just imagine what would happen if the filthy rich had to queue up alongside the poor to get an appointment to see a doctor, or get their teeth fixed.

Imagine what would happen if royalty, Lords, MPs and every one of the super-rich were told he or she had to wait in an ambulance outside hospital or in a corridor because there was no bed available on a ward.

The self-interested rich would be pouring money into the NHS at such a rate that once again it would be the envy of the world in no time.

I was saddened to hear Tony Blair , firstly agreeing that the NHS was in a parlous state, but then going on to say that there should be more private sector involvement in the NHS, saying there should be "complete cooperation between the public and private sector.”

Sorry Tony – it seems that as people get older and richer, they forget their socialist principles and turn blue. What you suggest will not prevent queue jumping and leave the poor at the bottom of the pile, as they were before 1948.

People in power in Britain need to take a long hard look at where the country is going and realise that if something is not done very soon the country is not going to be worth living in.

The NHS crisis is symptomatic of a disease which, for too long, has allowed the rich to get richer and the poor (and lower middle classes) poorer, resulting in millions of people having to put up with sub-standard care.

Slimmed Down Comunidad To Save 3 Million