Ideological Crap from the BMA’s chairman and others

On Friday 27th February I posted an entry on the NHS which referred to the Cheeky Crap of Dr Michael Ingram who feared that increasing “privatisation” of GP practices would metamorphose from a care system admired at home and abroad into one where the concept of a family doctor is just a distant memory, leaving me to point out that it had been a distant memory for at least a generation.  Indeed the family doctor concept began to disintegrate after GP practises were nationalised.

It is not difficult to see why, with the doctors’ trade union, the BMA (in which Dr Ingram has been quite active over the years) following the trade union principle (producers first, customers last) to a tee.

Rarely can this principle have been better illustrated than by the BMA’s current chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum, who told the Sunday Telegraph on 6th July that he was opposed to patients being allowed to “top up” their health service care by buying life-extending drugs that the NHS will not fund.

“My gut instinct is that this goes against the sort of NHS I believe in, which is  free at the point of use, fair and equitable for all”.

Unless you have a problem with your gut, and the solution isn’t free at the point of use.

Meanwhile in a letter to The Telegraph of 9th July from Mr Simon Wakeling of Heidelberg, who has had many years of exposure to both the UK and the German health services, says that “without a shadow of doubt that the German system is, in all respects, incomparably better.  German hospitals’ waiting lists?  What’s a waiting list?”  And so on.

More generally “health tourism” from the UK (often to much poorer countries) is a thriving industry.

The latest NHS scandal is in maternity wards, where the Healthcare Commission has again found a chronic shortage of facilities, to the point where in many cases mothers are likely to be turfed out in short order (24 hours is a long stay) or even turned away altogether.

Perhaps the same could be done with maternity leave.  Nicola Brewer, Czar of yet another new quango, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, first teased us by acknowledging that lawmaking is followed by the law of unintended consequences:

“new laws on maternity leave have had the unintended consequences of  increasing the disparity between the time mothers and fathers spend with their children” - (reported in the Telegraph 14th July 08)

But we all know what comes next:

“No-one is suggesting that women should not have the rights they have to  maternity leave, what we are saying is that dads need a slice of the action too”.

Or inaction, as the case may be.

The latest news is that the government intends to to link doctors’ “merit payments” to patient mortality and other measures such as post-operative mobility; in other words to pay bonuses based on a ridiculous array of “outcomes”. How about a competition to forecast how and when the law of unintended consequences will kick in on this one?