Tuesday 5 November 2013

You want the market? You're welcome to it!

Welcome to the free market driven modern United Kingdom. Welcome to the depersonalisation and the dehumanisation of the sick and vulnerable, lives put at risk and people degraded in the endless pursuit of market driven priorities. We are regaled today in the news about the spectacle in the NHS whereby, hospitals are consistently lying, falsifying records and bullying their staff to alter and change patient records. It was Mid-Staffs recently, today its Colchester. I've already commented on how bullying is the normal management practice throughout the country and of how bullying is the response of the coward and the incompetent. In Colchester its a combination of both. You see, NHS trusts are governed by political appointments with very few people in management having any kind of medical experience. NHS management is primarily staffed by accountants and business studies people who are all dedicated to the dominant free market model of targets, profit, and of course, bonuses. About the only universal left in our universal care system is the universal dedication of these people to cut costs and patient care, boost income and cut staff, wages, and conditions.

However, what is missing in the NHS is any form of a market. I mean, how can you have a market in health, how can you put a price on health? How on earth can any civilised person even contemplate pricing health and setting targets that place some conditions in priority positions over others? What this accomplishes is that the medical profession specialise in the big price returns such as heart and cancer and relegate other conditions that can be very distressing if not life threatening to a lower priority. They are not to be blamed for this as this is the priority of the trust who employ them and tell them that they must make a profit and show value for money. For a market to exist their must be competition and customers, and for competition to be meaningful there has to be multiple suppliers. I mean this situation is absurd and would be farcical were it not so serious. A patient isn't a customer, no-one goes to hospital to buy cancer or a heart transplant, but that is exactly the position market and target driven health care has put GPs in, as they have to literally buy such treatment as cheaply as they can from whoever is prepared to provide it. This means that hospitals have an incentive to specialise in such treatments which results in the neglect of many others. That is why there have been so many closures of accident and emergency departments as they cannot be subject to targets as their service is almost completely arbitrary, unless of course they decide that they will have to start causing accidents in order to meet their targets.

I tell you again, the market model is a fraud. There is no market in health, it has been invented and doesn't exist in reality. As I said, for competition to exist their must be multiple suppliers and what is happening in the NHS is the opposite, centralisation under a few trusts and some private providers who don't have any medical staff of their own, but poach them from the NHS. How on earth the people of this country have been conned into accepting this massive exercise in fraud and mendacity is quite astonishing. Fortunately the Scottish people have not been as widely exposed to this fraud as the rest of the UK and that is why the majority of these scandals are all in England and Wales. Britain is an extremely sick society, callous, uncaring and selfish. They express outrage over such occurrences as in Mid-Staffs and Colchester, but the reality is that they voted for it. They just didn't think it would happen to them. Remember that next September. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

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