In 2014/15 there were an estimated 43,900 excess winter deaths, the highest since the winter of 1999/00.
The winter death toll is Britain’s quiet annual tragedy, largely unremarked and generally ignored, but this winter is likely to be something else entirely.
Because of the steady erosion of our NHS by the Tories, and Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt in particular, this winter could spell the end of our NHS, free at the point of use, and be the final nail in the coffin that brings about the privatisation and US style health insurance schemes that have been the object of the economic starvation of our NHS all along.
Analysis by the BBC reveals that A&E performance during June, July and August this year was ‘worse than any winter in the past 12 years bar one. Only last winter marked a worse performance since the target was launched in 2004.’
The NHS is set to implode this winter according to Dr Mark Holland, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, who said, “The days when summer used to provide a respite for busy emergency departments had gone, and instead the NHS faced an “eternal winter”.”
If our NHS was stretched to the limit this summer, this winter is set to be a disaster, a disaster measured in tens of thousands of vulnerable lives.
The good news is that the many hundreds of parliamentarians and Lords who have financial involvement in private health care can look forward to a return on those interests at last, all of whom ‘were able to vote on the Health and Social Care bill (now Act), despite having a prejudicial interests’.
The Health and Social Care Act ended the secretary of state’s (Lansley and currently Hunt) core duty to provide or secure a comprehensive health service for all thus paving the way for privatisation which has been aggressively pursued ever since.
Oliver Letwin was reported in 2004 as saying that the “NHS will not exist” within five years of a Conservative election victory. Jeremy Hunt, whose task it is to oversee the destruction of our NHS, is doing such a good job that Theresa May kept him on as Health Secretary when she became the unelected sovereign of the Tory party. It is small wonder that Hunt grins like the cat who got the cream having apparently been the recipient of ‘£32,920 from hedge fund baron Andrew Law, a major investor in healthcare firms’.
This winter, not only are we likely to see an astronomical rise in needless deaths, but it is unlikely that our NHS itself will survive the winter.
Many of us have been warning for years that the end is nigh for our NHS yet this week it seems that the most galvanising issue for the general public is whether Tesco will continue to sell Marmite as Unilever hikes the prices of a range of branded items, including Comfort, Pot Noodles and Magnums.
It really does seem the case that ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. Despite the best efforts of nurses, GPs, junior doctors, campaigners, the media, both mainstream and independent, and social media, the great British public are not interested and that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, because only the public has the potential power to stop the Tories stealing our NHS from us. Public indifference, then, is even more disastrous for our NHS than Jeremy Hunt.
Tory MEP Daniel Hannan has dismissed the NHS as a wartime relic and a “60-year mistake” that he would not wish “on anyone”. That wartime relic has saved countless millions of lives, including Stephen Hawking’ and my own, but saving lives seems an irrelevance to those hell bent on personal profit at our very great expense.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34919149
https://socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk/p/key-facts-of-lords-and-mps-connections.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/selling-nhs-profit-full-list-4646154
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/selling-nhs-profit-tories-liberal-4645961
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37639518
https://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/nhs-tory-labour-hannan-health
