Starmer wants to put GP's on NHS payroll!

 

Labour Party leader - Sir Keir Starmer

The leader of the Labour Party, Sir Kier Starmer, says the NHS is free at the point of use. But people who use the NHS don't get it for free. We pay for it out of taxation whether we are in work or out of work. We all pay tax, in one way or another.

In muggins's England, prescriptions are not free for most people like they are in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Most people have to pay £9.35 per item. National Insurance contributions are just another tax. What funds pensions and the NHS, is general taxation, not what you've paid in N.I. contributions.

The stranglehold that self-employed GP's and their union the BMA, have on health services in this country, needs to be urgently addressed. Although British GPs are among the best paid in the Western world, with most earning more than £100,000 a year, and many working part-time, many GPs are now reluctant to see patients face-to-face and want to do virtual consultations over the phone or by Skype. What use it that? How do you test someone's blood pressure over the phone or examine their chest? There have been instances of GPs asking patients to cough into the phone. Doctors and nurses working within NHS hospitals, have no choice but to see patients face-to-face. Keir Starmer wants to put GP's on the NHS payroll, so they become NHS employees.

The system of medical regulation also needs looking at. Far too often, doctors are marking their own homework, and are investigating themselves. We've had instances where patients have been put on end of life palliative care, and their families were never told. The Gosport War Memorial Hospital scandal, that led to a police investigation but no charges, showed how over 400 elderly patients during 1987 and 2001, were given powerful opiates, often quite unnecessarily, to sedate them, which resulted in a premature shortening of life.

Whose interest does the General Medical Council, really serve? As the Irish author, George Bernard Shaw, famously said: "All professions are conspiracies against the laity."