Lansley’s health paper; Cameron can’t airbrush this away…

Conservative Home flags-up Andrew Lansley’s latest attempt at a coherent policy. It is so ironic that for every attack on a ‘big state’ by Conservatives there is a countervailing proposal to increase the states power and control. You being to see how fundamentally dishonest and false the Conservative perspective is through this prism.  

For example, take the proposed creation of a ‘Department of Public Health’, this department will have a separate budget to the NHS and it will need an attendant bureaucracy and carry attendant added costs. This department ‘will focus on providing national leadership in the fight to prevent ill-health and promote well-being’ and will do so through ‘decentralisation’ and introducing systems of ‘payment by results’. How’s that for Orwellian newspeak?  

Looking through the Green Paper Lasnsley is promoting what can be seen is what a complete mess Conservative policy actually is. Take this phrase;  

We will not dictate how they achieve better public health outcomes. We will, however, reward them for the results they achieve.  

  

Maybe Lansley (or anybody else for that matter) would care to explain how the results are determined if not by some form of centrally determined measure? So much for criticising Labour’s obsession with targets. 

David Cameron has committed to not cutting the NHS budget yet Lansley’s paper exposes that promise for the blatant untruth it is; 

 

We will separate the public health budget from the budget for NHS services and devolve much more of the public health budget to local authorities and their *health service partners*. 

So, yes the NHS budget will be cut because it will be hived-off and ‘devolved’ elsewhere including no doubt to private companies (health service partners). Moving the money sideways will allow the Conservatives to claim they are not cutting when of course, they are. Also, it will allow subtly undermine the NHS which is, after-all, what the Conservatives really want. 

What Lansley’s paper is really about is the systematic erosion of the NHS and the services it provides and the implementation of a ‘market model’ of healthcare provision as is illustrarted here; 

To encourage a new market in innovative public health solutions is opened up in every part of the country, we will require local public health directors to ensure that an increasing proportion of contracts are awarded to providers from the private and voluntary sectors. 

 

A Conservative government would be bad for Britain’s health. Cameron can airbrush his posters all he wants however he can’t avoid the real consequences of his parties policies which are to cut and undermine the NHS.