The NHS bill is 'a charter for private profit at the expense of patients care', says Unite

19 January 2011

The NHS bill unveiled today is a charter for private profit at the expense of patient care, Unite, the largest union in the country, said.

Unite was commenting in the wake of reports that the Tories have been bankrolled to the tune of £750,000 in donations from private healthcare firms since David Cameron became leader in 2005.

Unite said that the Health and Social Care Bill – the largest piece of health legislation since the NHS's inception in 1948 – would make services for patients become more remote as the planned GP consortia, due to control most of the NHS budget from 2013, became fewer in number, but serving a wider area.

Unite's National Officer for Health, David Fleming said: 'It is clear that one of the biggest influences on Tory ideology regarding health policy has been the massive and insidious lobbying by the private healthcare companies, which have opened their cheque books for David Cameron big-time.'

'How can the 68 year old women in Birmingham waiting for a hip replacement operation trust that the Tories and their Lib-Dem allies have her best interests at heart when it is the private healthcare companies, greedy for profit, who have the ear of the Prime Minister and his Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley? This is crunch time for MPs to decide which side they are on.'

'The bill is a charter for private profit at the expense of patient care and should be strongly resisted. The public - and that includes those on the moderate wing of the Conservative Party - needs to wake up to the scale of the changes proposed.'

'The GP consortia, the supposed vanguard of this so-called reform programme, will be juggling financial decisions with the help of the private healthcare companies they will buy-in, versus the needs of their patients – this is a stark conflict of interest. Patients should always come first.'

Earlier this week in a letter to The Times, Unite and five other health organisations, warned that: 'The sheer scale of the ambitious and costly reform programme, and the pace of change, whilst at the same time being tasked with making £20 billion of savings, is extremely risky and potentially disastrous.'

---

Press releases, papers and documents published on this page are the intellectual property of an organisation unrelated to ePolitix.com. We promote their parliamentary and political campaigning activities as they are subscribers to the ePolitix.com service.

As such, ePolitix.com does not edit, endorse, or attempt to balance the opinions expressed on this page. The content of press releases and other such types of content are the responsibility of the originating organisation.