Sir – We are delighted that Dr Helen Salisbury is standing for the National Health Action party in Oxford West and Abingdon, one of the most marginal seats in the UK. We urge everyone who believes in the NHS to vote for her in May 2015.
The NHS is not unaffordable — it’s under-funded and over-managed. From its birth in 1948 until 1993, the cost of administering universal healthcare, free at the point of delivery, was 4-5 per cent of its total budget. It is estimated that this has already risen to 16 per cent and could rise further to 30-40 per cent, as in the US, to pay for yet more managers, lawyers, contract negotiators, accountants etc that market-based systems require.
We consistently spend less GDP on health than the European average. Vast sums are wasted on unworkable IT systems, Foundation status for hospitals and crippling PFIs (thank you, Labour); and on hugely expensive reorganisations and ‘reforms’ — the last and worst being the Health and Social Care Act of 2013 (thank you, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats).
The consequence? Disastrously fragmented services and more and more of the NHS budget going not to nurses, doctors and ambulance drivers but to Virgin, Carillion, G4S — and to global management consultancies McKinsey, Deloitte and PwC.
It is no coincidence that private health corporations are generous donors to both Coalition and Labour parties, and provide lucrative jobs for MPs when they leave parliament.
But the NHA party is about much more than the NHS: it is about a healthy environment, clean air to breathe, affordable housing, and an end to austerity economics that forces the poor into destitution and leaves the bankers with their grotesque bonuses.
The politicians have brought the NHS to its deathbed. We need to send Dr Salisbury to Westminster to bring it back to life.
Dr Oliver Ormerod
Consultant cardiologist
Penelope Ormerod
Freelance editor
Sir Iain Chalmers
Health services researcher
Professor David Stuckler
Dr Maggie Stearn
Dr Peggy Frith
Retired physician
Dr Sarah Ledingham
General Practitioner
Dr Catharine Benson
General Practitioner
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