A cross-party solution to NHS pressures?

[Northerner]

Just before Easter, Theresa May announced she had finally accepted the case for a longer-term, and bigger financial commitment to the NHS.

But how much to pay, and how to find the money is not yet decided.

The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has appealed to his colleagues for ideas, promising in a letter to all Tory MPs that solutions for the NHS and proposals on social care will be settled by the summer.

But a cross-party group of MPs including former ministers, is again urging the government to convert National Insurance into a specific tax for the NHS.

That proposal is part of a wider set of principles upon which they would base a commission to look at the health service's long-term pressures, that is being published today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43875246

 

[kentish maid]

There will come the day when if you have not paid into an 'NHS tax' you will not get treatment. 🙄

 

[Northerner]

The thing is, they are making out that it's the system that isn't working, but real-terms funding has been cut to the bone, councils have had their funding curtailed so they can't provide the social care that's needed, people are being put off training as nurses because bursaries have been changed to loans, junior doctors have been vilified and pressurised, services outsourced and privatised, a huge and unnecessary reorganisation and new layers of bureaucracy introduced....the situation has been engineered, in my opinion. There's always money for bombs and missiles, or votes from the DUP, or money to waste on failed franchise allocations. I could go on