AS FAR as this reactionary coalition government is concerned, anybody who is sick for more than four weeks in a year is probably engaging in criminal action and defrauding the state.
As a matter of course, the same standard is not being applied to the banks and the bankers, who have already been handed over a trillion by the state to prevent their entire system from collapsing, even though much of the collapse was due to questionable speculation, illegal activities and dodgy sub-prime mortgages!
In fact, the HMRC record of one prosecution as far as the HSBC tax evaders is concerned, contrasts with Cameron’s determination to harass one million sick people and force them off sick benefit!
PM Cameron has vowed to put an end to the ‘sick note culture’.
He has now moved to insist that anyone ill for more than four weeks in a year will face a fit-for-work test at the hands of a private company, Health Management Limited, which could see them ordered back to work by the private company that will be testing them, or lose their sickness benefit.
The state is aghast that there are more than a million UK citizens who are sick for over four weeks in any one year, and concludes that this is a form of theft, not that this growth of sickness is a product of the state of the collapsing capitalist system.
All GPs will be expected to refer such patients to Health Management Limited to assess their ability to work and draw up a plan for their return.
Big business is already demanding that the scheme, currently being piloted in 20 GP surgeries, be made compulsory, when everybody knows that a refusal to take part in such a scheme by a sick person will be seen as evidence of the guilt of the person concerned, who no doubt could then face further action by the state.
Those who are sick for more than four weeks a year are to be presumed guilty until they are proven innocent.
The Tory plan is also a vote of no confidence in the GPs who are assumed to be so unprofessional and so inadequate as doctors that they have become part of ‘the sick note culture’.
No doubt there will be a campaign for doctors to be disciplined who have been giving sick notes to patients who have been found guilty by Health Management Limited.
While GPs are examining their patients at their surgeries, what mechanisms will the private company be using to prove and convict the guilty?
Patients who agree to be referred to the company will undergo a telephone assessment of their physical and mental abilities from a trained nurse and occupational therapists.
Cameron is actually making a case for the abolition of GPs and their surgery-based practices in favour of telephone care!
‘The introduction of the Fit for Work service is an important step in supporting employees, GPs and employers to manage sickness absence better,’ Lord Freud, minister for welfare reform told The Times.
‘Providing support where it’s needed most will help to reduce the length of time employees take off sick which in turn will cut sick pay costs, improve economic output and reduce the chance of people falling out of work and having to claim benefits.’
What nonsense. Health Management Limited is to operate a guillotine!
The Tories are asserting that one million users of the NHS are fraudsters, that the GPs who continually give them sick notes are their accomplices and that the job of the privateer HML is to claw back the £9bn, after establishing in the course of a telephone examination that the GPs who had provided the patient with a sick note are incompetent.
The British Medical Association said yesterday it would boycott the scheme if doctors felt it was forcing people back to work. All GPs will support this since the scheme is based on the idea that GPs, through their lack of competence, are aiding and abetting a £9bn fraud!
The BMA must boycott this scheme, and the Tories, who believe that bankers can do no wrong and that the NHS and GPs can do no right, must be brought down, and replaced by a workers government and socialism. This is the only way to save the NHS!