A cornerstone of Conservative policymaking is to create the conditions for failure, then use the ensuing failure as justification for further cuts. Nowhere is this more apparent than the shameless gutting of British healthcare infrastructure, ordered by billionaires who pitch their thievery under the rhetoric of “tightening our belts,” while themselves flying out to private healthcare providers knowing full well how abysmal the public system is.
Throw their sales pitch back in their face.
In 2013, the NHS said it had a £30 billion funding gap, and the Tory response to this was to provide £8 billion in extra funding and require the NHS to find the other £22 billion in cuts. To this day, the government claims it has fully funded the NHS, by requiring it to find its own cuts. It gave the NHS a hacksaw, told it to choose a limb to amputate, and tells everyone else it saved its life by not shooting it in the head. But everyone else is not fooled. Nigel Edwards, chief executive at the health think tank the Nuffield Trust, said in 2016 that “the NHS has never experienced this level of austerity for this long a period.”
The Conservative government response to this latest crisis has been predictably shite. The NHS minister Philip Dunne caused outrage when he said “There are seats available in most hospitals where beds are not available,” in response to a question from a Labour MP about patients sleeping on the floor. May planned to demote Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt in a cabinet reshuffle this week. Instead, after he “argued strongly with the prime minister that he should be allowed to stay in his role,” she not only relented but expanded his brief to include social care, too.
Presumably, the logic behind this is that the NHS crisis is really a social care crisis, too. “Bed-blocking,” where elderly patients who have been treated can’t leave hospitals because they have no arrangements for care when they leave, is a rising problem. In January 2017, the Telegraph reported that bed-blocking had risen 42 percent in one year, with 193,680 “bed days” lost in November 2016.
-Shiv
A cornerstone of Conservative policymaking is to create the conditions for failure, then use the ensuing failure as justification for further cuts.
It seems to me that that strategy has worked, up to a point, but the populace is starting to catch on to it. The US republican party did it so egregiously surrounding ACA and the citizens who were “against obamacare” and discovered that their ‘representatives’ were gutting ACA – they learned that lesson hard. It’s going to take a while to sink in but I expect a surly, stupid, sloppy, populist backlash. Which probably means they’ll take revenge in the wrong direction, or something, but revenge will be taken. That trick just isn’t going to work very well for much longer.
Dunno, Marcus. I’d like to think that the trick won’t work much longer, but “trickle down economics” is still selling to a significant chunk of the populace. I’m sadly envisioning something more like Charlie Brown falling for Lucy’s holding the football for him to kick, then pulling it away. Over, and over, and over, and over….
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha no they didn’t.
invivoMark@#2:
I think that a lot of them did; they just don’t want to face up to it. Instead they’re whining about liberals making fun of them. But they know why.
Learning was never their strong suit. They may have altered their behavior in response to changes in their environment, but we can agree to disagree about whether that constitutes learning. I think most of them honestly hope their healthcare can be dictated purely by market forces again. They probably believe invisible hands do the best surgery.
There are a lot of programmes on British television about different parts of the NHS. It is interesting to me that they are to be found on all the terresrial channels and that they are almost uniformly showing staff working as best they can under the restraints the funding crisis is causing, and where they are not doing this they are showing things like the incredible work surgeons do, including groundbreaking research. In other words regardless of funding sources the channels are all making the point that it is the lack of funding that is causing problems.
The previous conservative governments in Alberta did this too, especially during the Ralph Klein years. They’d massively cut healthcare spending then talk about how the system is broken and can’t be fixed by “throwing money at it” (aka paying doctors, nurses, and support staff).
The current NDP government is doing what it can to make things right, but they won’t survive the next election because people are freaking out over having to pay for the services they want through taxes.