THE Government’s planned reforms of the NHS – the largest since its foundation in 1948 – will affect every person in Oxfordshire in a spectacular fashion.

The health service will change beyond recognition within a decade as private healthcare companies take a stranglehold.

The Health and Social Care Bill, currently before MPs, is very complex, with technical language that is baffling – but if you cut through the jargon, it is a charter to encourage competition, fragmentation and privatisation.

The NHS is one of the most efficient health services in the world and has, recently, gained its highest public satisfaction ratings for a generation.

No wonder the Government does not wish to make public its risk assessment document on what the reforms will actually mean – it is too damning.

And that’s why health professionals, patient groups and the public are lobbying MPs today as the Bill reaches a critical point in its Parliamentary journey.

Under the ‘reforms’, the new clinical commissioning groups will dole out the money for treatments, but when the cash runs out for that year, patients will have to dig into their pockets and pay for treatments from the private sector or suffer in agony until the next financial year.

You will get rationing of drugs for cancer patients which are deemed to be too expensive by the new breed of accountants holding the purse strings.

The culture of profit will trump patient care. The shareholders of private healthcare companies will be in the driving seat, not your trusted GP.

The NHS is rightly regarded across the world as a template of how healthcare can be delivered – it is envied by other developed countries – and now, inexplicably, that 64-year old achievement is about to be dismantled.

Speak out now, Save Our NHS, write in protest to your MP.

For more information, see unitetheunion.org/saveournhs

JOHN ROWSE, regional secretary, Unite