EX-LABOUR MP Alice Mahon is considering taking the NHS to the High Court after the service refused to allow her access to a drug that will prevent her losing her sight.
Mahon, 69, lost most of the sight in one eye due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and expects to lose it in the other. Calderdale Primary Care Trust (PCT) has refused to fund a drug which could stabilise or improve her condition.
Mahon is just one of the 18,000 people in the UK who go blind every year due to the condition.
People are entitled to demand just where all of the extra billions that the Labour government has put into the NHS in the last four years has gone, when there is no cash for much needed operations, and people are being allowed to go blind.
At the same time nurses and junior doctors are being sacked, once again there are not enough beds, and patients are once again sleeping on trolleys in hospital corridors, while entire hospitals are being closed.
The NHS proper is being starved of cash and sabotaged, while billions of the NHS budget are flowing into the coffers of the private sector, which is flourishing at the expense of the NHS.
The privateers are making huge profits out of the establishment and running of unregulated private treatment centres, and out of the privatisation of commissioning, and the referring of patients out of the NHS into the private sector.
The Private Finance Initiative has allowed big business to make hundreds of millions of profit out of the building and leasing to the NHS of a single hospital, such as the Norfolk and Norwich NHS Trust.
There are now a number of billion pound NHS trusts being built under the PFI, such as the Barts and Royal London NHS Trust. Big business is again making hundreds of millions out of the project, whose costs are now spiralling out of control, requiring big cuts, including a cut to the number of floors in the new hospital, even before it has opened.
One £900 million PFI scheme has just collapsed with a House of Commons Committee giving a serious warning to Health Secretary Hewitt.
The House of Commons public accounts committee said the government had left the Paddington Health Campus project to local managers who were ‘out of their depth’.
The project, designed to merge three north-west London hospitals, was abandoned after costs rose by £300 million.
Billions are being taken out of the NHS budget and are being poured into the coffers of the private sector, including hugely expensive PFI schemes, some of which are now collapsing.
There is no limit to the cash available to the private sector, but for the NHS there is no cash at all.
Primary Care Trusts now tell workers like Mahon that if they cannot pay for treatment they will have to take the risk of losing their sight.
This is not the NHS ethic of treatment free at the point of need.
It is the big business law of the jungle; the survival of only those who are able to pay. This ethic must be stamped out. There is no place for it in the NHS.
However the attacks on the NHS are now being mounted on a daily basis.
These attacks must be defeated.
The trade unions in the localities must form Councils of Action with the local communities and occupy all hospitals faced with ward cuts and closure.
Occupations must be accompanied by a campaign in the trade unions to force the union leaders and the TUC to take national strike action to bring down the Blair-Brown government and bring in a workers’ government.This government must drive the privateers out of the NHS and restore the NHS back to its position as the world leader in health care.
