I know on this blog I’ve ranted and raved about the destruction of the NHS, but it appears the final plank is in place. Whilst the legislation passed a while back to allow private companies to become NHS providers, i.e. opening the door to privatising the NHS, the regulations that were yet to be passed still held out some slight hope for slowing that privatisation. (Now, this is going to be a little dull for a second, but keep reading…)
The reason for the potential delay was because the regulations that defined how the GP Commissioning Groups would choose providers for particular services had not been written yet. So there was some hope that with some beating the wording could be made to make sure the NHS was at least a little bit protected.
Last week the House of entitled arseholes Lords passed the government’s sneaky section 75 regulations. s75, as they are known in the healthcare circles are the regulations that define how commissioning groups chose providers. And they’ve been worded in such a way as to ensure that the NHS is gutted as quickly as possible.
Not that you’d know this from the almost utterly silent press.
Apparently the mirror had something, although I couldn’t see it on their web front page, or their health page. The Belfast Telegraph appears to be the only paper that’s covered it, and it’s about 3/4 of the way down their web-front-page.
So despite my mother’s pain at me going and working in a for-profit healthcare system in the USA, I’m thinking the that, if DOMA unpasses, then that’s where we’ll be going. Because the For-Profit healthcare system here is undoubtably going to be at least as bad as that in the states. And I don’t think I can bear watching them do that to the NHS. Canada seems to want an inordinately large sum of money to have me work there, which is ridiculous ($1800 for the assessment (plus $900 flight) then $600 for the exam plus $900 flights, with no guarantee at the end of that of a job. Also, they’ve taken nurse of their skilled worker list, so we would then have to go the long way round for citizenship. That move also implies an excess of nurses in Canada as a whole (despite Nova Scotia appearing to be somewhat short of them, at least out in the boonies). I guess I should start researching the good old US-of-A for immigration purposes…
