Sign the petition for the NHS Reinstatement Bill
Why is this important?
The NHS in England is being dismantled. NHS services – including acute and emergency, children’s, elderly, and maternity care – have been deliberately underfunded since 2010. The comprehensive care we’ve come to expect continues to be cut back.
Many services have been handed to private companies such as Virgin, Serco, and US giant United Health, hiding behind the NHS logo. Valuable NHS buildings and land are being sold off to property developers, often as a result of the exorbitant costs of paying for new hospitals built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
These are our services and our assets. We the public own them. And polls repeatedly show that most of us want to keep our NHS.
Privatised services cost the NHS and tax payer far more than when provided by our publicly owned and publicly run NHS.
That is because public health systems don’t seek profits. They don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders. They don’t have the added costs of private sector loans. And they don’t have to pay the management fees that private companies charge.
A public NHS also doesn’t have privatisation’s heavy marketing and contract administration costs of extra lawyers, accountants and management – at least £4.5 billion annually on one estimate and rising. Just cutting them, not NHS services, would go a long way to cover the shortfall between government underfunding and the NHS’ needs over the next five years.
These huge commercial costs and the chaos caused by the ongoing NHS fragmentation are the direct result of privatisation. This is endangering the quality and safety of our public healthcare.
That is why we need the National Health Service Bill to remove the costs and waste of privatisation. The NHS Bill will reinstate the NHS as a proper public service. It is due to get its second reading in Parliament on Friday 11th March 2016.
You can find out who your MP is, how to write your letter and get more information on the NHS Reinstatement Bill Group’s website: http://www.nhsbill2015.org/
And join in the conversation on Twitter: @nhsbillnow and #NHSBillNow.
Keep our NHS public Greater Manchester 