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Privatisation of the health service would be a complete and utter waste
• IT was refreshing to read of Sir Robert Naylor’s opposition to privatisation of the health service (Forget private firms, let us run the polyclinic pleads hospital boss, October 23).
The false notion that public service and rabid commercialism can coexist is baseless. They are not the same and never can be: they are mutually at odds in both motivation and intention.
It is no surprise that Richard Branson’s hastily incorporated Virgin Health has been sniffing round the health service budget. There are potentially even richer pickings here than from the transport budget from which he extracted £24million last year alone via his Virgin Trains operation. Added to the countless millions handed to shareholders in all the privatised rail companies, this is nothing but a complete and utter waste of public money. The same would happen to health.
At a time when the private sector has shown itself to be both venal and incompetent like never before (and is whingeing and whining for handouts from the public purse) the fact that there are still dunderheads in national and local government who are even considering handing over vast sums of public money to the likes of Branson and his ilk beggars belief.
Either we want public services and pay for them in cash via taxation or we don’t. The sooner the blather we hear from our overseers about how we can have it both ways stops the better. It is not true and it never was.
Martin Kennedy
Brewer Street, W1
Local GPs
• IT is encouraging that someone with extensive and hands-on experience of working in a privately financed hospital should come out personally and so strongly against the privatisation of other health services.
Not surprisingly, Sir Robert Naylor would like to run a polyclinic in University College Hospital. Now the public would like to know what health services could be usefully provided in such a clinic. Pressure needs to be taken off A&E and clearly some diagnostic tests and prescriptions fall outside the normal work of most GP surgeries. However, many people (and from local surveys, most) want to keep present GP services local to their homes and provided by doctors they know and who know them .
It would be helpful to hear from our primary care trust about their approach to privatisation after the rather disastrous takeover of three practices by UnitedHealth.
June Grun
Savernake Road, NW3 |
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