Tuesday 20 November 2018

Theresa May's Brexit plot spells disaster for the NHS


Aside from whipping up hate against the 3 million EU citizens in the EU with her outrageous insinuation that EU workers have cheated their way into the UK, Theresa May is also using Brexit as an excuse to vandalise the NHS.

10% of NHS doctors have come to the UK from the EU via Freedom of Movement. 7% of EU nurses, and 7% of all UK care workers.

The NHS is already straining under a Tory-created recruitment crisis (8 years of NHS funding cuts, scrapping of NHS Bursaries, the sickening Tory treatment of junior doctors, massive cuts to social care services causing a huge increase in demand for NHS services, the collapse in overseas nurse recruitment since the Brexit vote).

The NHS is short of 41,000 nurses and 12,000 doctors already, and the recruitment gap is getting bigger and bigger with staff shortages of 350,000 predicted within a decade.

So by deliberately slamming the door shut on skilled health care workers from the EU, and by making EU-born health workers who are already here feel unwelcome by deliberately whipping up public hate against them with insinuations they cheated their way into the country, Theresa May is clearly intent on exacerbating the NHS recruitment crisis.

Why would Theresa May and the Tories wish to deliberately push the NHS towards ruin in this way?

The reason is that the Tories have always hated the NHS with an undying ideological passion, ever since they opposed its creation back in the 1940s.

They hate it because providing health care on the basis of need, rather than the ability to pay for it, is an example of socialism in action.

When poor and ordinary people with serious illnesses are prioritised over extremely wealthy people with minor ailments, it makes the Tories and their mega-rich backers furious, because selfish entitled elitists like them believe that the rich should always have the ability to buy their way to the front of any queue.

Theresa May's efforts to drive skilled EU workers out of the NHS are all part of the grand Tory scheme to privatise the NHS and replace the universal health care model with private insurance system, whereby the wealthy get the best treatment while the poor and uninsured are left to the mercies of massively over-crowded and under-funded charity hospitals.

The Tories are seeking to undermine, underfund, and de-staff the NHS as much as possible because they know that the only way they can sell their NHS privatisation agenda to the public is by reducing the quality of service to such an extent that people will accept their NHS privatisation propaganda out of sheer desperation.

Don't just take my word for it, consider what the Chair of Conservative Health Paul Charlson's view that the only possible way to replace the NHS with a private fee-based system would be "if there was a feeling in the country that health services are falling apart".

And what better way to ensure that health services are falling apart than by following up 8 years of ruinous ideologically driven funding cuts (at a time of rising demand for services) with a deliberately manufactured NHS recruitment crisis?

If Theresa May succeeds in using Brexit as a means of wrecking the NHS and bringing in a privatised health insurance based replacement the Tories will be absolutely ecstatic because they've been desperate to get rid of the socialist NHS for over 70 years.

If she succeeds she'd go from being the hubristic fool who threw away her own majority, to the revered Tory leader who finally achieved the Tory wet dream of destroying the NHS. 


Ironically the people who would suffer the most from this Tory ruination of the NHS are the demographics who were most likely to have voted for Brexit in the first place: the pensioners, and people from poor left-behind communities. Because pensioners and the poor are also by far the most likely to be dependent on the provision of free healthcare, and the ones least likely to be able to cover the cost of private health insurance premiums.

And worst of all, not an insignificant number of these Brexit voters will have voted for Brexit because they believed the '£350 million for the NHS' lie on that damned Brexit bus, and imagined that voting for Brexit would actually help the NHS!


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