Jeremy Hunt has taken the absolute piss out of the British electorate. On Good Morning Britain, the Health Secretary suggested that the only way to save the NHS is to vote Conservative:
If you want to get more money into the NHS, if you want to pay nurses more – and we all want to do that – then there is only one thing that matters in this election. And that is getting a good outcome for the Brexit negotiations.
Strengthen the Prime Minister at the ballot box and she’ll strengthen the NHS, the story goes. But NHS workers themselves are warning that a Conservative victory will, actually, be the end of our health service.
As a junior doctor, I have a #publicduty to inform you that the Tories are gradually killing our NHS. Please don't enable them.#voteNHS.
— Alex Ashman (@AlexAshman) April 20, 2017
And a Westminster majority would embolden the Conservatives’ privatisation agenda.
Paying for healthcare
Of course, the Conservatives’ privatisation strategy is under the radar. The British public cherish the NHS. That’s why, when the Tories quietly proposed moving to a pay-NHS in 2015, they did it very quietly.
But the Tories are deliberately setting the NHS on course to crash and burn, so the private sector can swoop in and ‘save the day’.
Take a look at how much the Conservative government has defunded our health service, according to its own figures:
It’s all part of the plan
Indeed, public dissatisfaction levels with the NHS are at the highest level for 30 years. But this is all part of the plan.
Hunt co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be replaced with a privatised insurance system, back in 2005. Accordingly, the 2012 Health and Social Care Act legally abolished the NHS as a public service. This opened the NHS up to marketisation.
Correspondingly, Department of Health figures show that the amount of money going to “independent sector providers” more than doubled, from £4.1bn in 2009-10 to £8.7bn in 2015-16.
Now, campaigners say the government’s major Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are the next step:
The Government’s Sustainability and Transformation Plans [STP] are a smokescreen for a massive programme of hospital and community service closures, and are its latest instrument for privatisation.
This is the aim of the Conservative Party: for profiteering private companies – like Virgin, Circle, Bupa, Serco, UnitedHealth and even US arms giant Lockheed Martin – to feast upon our public health service. So Hunt suggesting that a Conservative vote would save the NHS shows he’s truly taking the piss.
Watch the exchange on Good Morning Britain here:
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Featured image via Youtube