UK National Health Service not helping those who need it most

This is the story of a 5 year old boy with a life altering condition.

Normally the UK NHS would pay for any treatment but this is not covered and his parents are facing a bill of up to £30,000 to give him the same kind of life the rest of us take for granted.

This is his story: www.sunderlandecho.com... 5863721#comments

If anyone would like to donate then the link is here.

I do apologise if this is against the T&Cs of this site but I really feel this is a cause worth promoting.

reply to post by PheonixReborn


Top link not working.

This is it


OP click Quote on this post to see how to embed the link

I was just saying in another thread how our NHS has been run down.

Who remembers the 16 billion tax cut recently given to the rich and wealthy? Well stories like this show where that 16 billion was taken from.

Was hoping for a better response than this.

reply to post by PheonixReborn


You want quality social healthcare with a corrupt government structure,
I'd like to go to the moon, but it'll probably never happen. Not that I disagree with you, I just don't think it's realistic till the government is changed.

Well this is disgusting.

I swear their personally running down the NHS to then sell it off. I would donate but im on the dole myself, £56 a week, cant really afford it. Poor little lad :/

The NHS is the single biggest achievement of post-war Britain.

Unfortunately this particular group of self-serving and amoral shysters who govern us do not view it that way.

They are intent on stripping it down and running it on a shoestring whilst ignoring the blatant overcharging scam that operates between suppliers into the NHS - is it surprising that many politicians have links and shares to the drug firms and other suppliers?

www.independent.co.uk...

We have a Health Secretary who described the NHS as a '60 year mistake' and who is hell bent on furthering the privatisation programme.
And we have a Chancellor who is only too willing to help him.

And while many people support the ring-fencing of the NHS to protect it from the impact of government spending cuts, there are real concerns that while other areas of government are squeezed to within an inch of their lives, the NHS is allowed to get away with this sort of gratuitous overspending.

It's not going to take many headlines like this before George Osborne starts to seriously consider whether the NHS deserves such generous protection after-all.

money.aol.co.uk...

And we have MSM who delight in portraying the NHS in a bad light at every opportunity.
A perfect example is the constant stream of stories from rags like The Sun whose only purpose it seems is to give a negative image of the NHS.

www.thesun.co.uk...

When the truth is that the NHS does a remarkably good job for the vast majority of it's patient's under trying and difficult circumstances.

Yes, it is riddled with mis-management, a 'jobs for the boys' ethos at middle and upper management level and more than just a sprinkling of outright corruption.

The NHS could and should be so much better.
We need to cut out the excessive waste, invest in the employee's and their needs at every level and demand standards and a level of service and care that we would expect from a 'world class' business.

Here is a link to Show which MPs have vested interests in private healthcare. The NHS is a gold mine waiting to be plundered. socialinvestigations.blogspot.co.uk...

30. Jeremy Hunt: MP for South-West Surrey. Received a donation to his office of £3,000 in June 2012, just under 3 months from when he was made health secretary, from U.S-based hedge fund CEO Andrew Law. Mr Law is the CEO of Caxton Associates who as of November 2011, owned a market value of $217.659 million in healthcare. Andrew Law has given £231,530 to the Conservative party, all but £3,000 of this in 2012. Electoral Commission

The corporate run media running down the NHS should be no surprise.

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Here's a link to some recent proposals that have been put forth to make the system better. Though personally I believe NHS has been a life saviour to countless folks in UK and those visiting. But guess this excerpt from the link above pretty much sums it up!

The government says NHS is one of the most generous systems in the world and is also "open to abuse, by those intent on cheating the system"

yet they think nothing of keeping somebody in jail at a cost of £30.000 per year .

it is about time some people were rounded up

Our experiences of the NHS have been poor. Hospital emergency units are like war zones in the evenings and weekends. And it's difficult to get a same day doctor's appointment unless you're very "persistent". Not only do their staff not care, they've long since given up pretending to care.

I didn't know anything about this surgical procedure until tonight. It seems complicated and not without risk. I'd be happy for the child to have his operation at the public expense. But please send him to USA where he'll get the best care.

I wouldn't wish the NHS on any British child.

So has anyone donated or is everyone just spouting off their own personal predjudices and ignoring the plight of this kid?

This is one of the reasons people argue against single payer.

Some bureaucratic bean counter found that it is more cost effective to ax people then pay.
The realities of universal health care are starting to crash down around on people in the UK, it was never sustainable.

I feel bad for that family but, the real issue should be why would it cost £30k for the treatment.

reply to post by Azdraik


More sustainable than the Zombie banks the UK is putting billions of pounds in to, to help clear their toxic assets. Bail out private institutions with public money, but let the NHS go to pot.

reply to post by Azdraik

The realities of universal health care are starting to crash down around on people in the UK, it was never sustainable.

Nonsense.
Of course it's sustainable.
It just needs to be managed professionally and eliminate the huge amounts of waste and over-pricing etc and regain it's emphasis on providing medical care to the people of this country rather than generating profit for major pharmaceutical companies and other related businesses.

Originally posted by Freeborn
reply to post by Azdraik
"eliminate the huge amounts of waste and over-pricing etc and regain it's emphasis on providing medical care to the people of this country rather than generating profit for major pharmaceutical companies and other related businesses

And there is the the issue. People think businesses are in it to "help" people. They are in it for money. Nothing more, nothing less. The more they can suck out of you the better.

Any business small, med, or large have the same bottom line. How much money can it make. As I said the current formula for health care is not sustainable. Due to ridiculous costs for modern day procedures. Do I agree with the costs no. But, due to the costs, single payer will fail.

Address the costs then you might have a working health system. That will never happen though, too much money to be made.

Originally posted by Freeborn

We have a Health Secretary who described the NHS as a '60 year mistake'

This is so plain, so blatant a statement as regards direction and ultimate aim that I thought it warranted repeating.

NHS, 60 year mistake


Why I'm stepping down as a GP over NHS 'reforms' - The framework for wholesale privatisation of the organisation, supply, finance and distribution of our healthcare is now in place

It's been an amazing privilege working as a family doctor. I am trusted with the long-term care and health of sometimes four generations, and I have tried to help with their most intimate and complex problems, sometimes shared only with me. It's the best job in medicine, and the NHS was the best place to practice.

So why am I retiring early? Because for several years I've fought the dismantling of the founding principles of Bevan's NHS and on 1 April I lost. That was the day the main provisions of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 came into effect. On Wednesday night, a last-gasp attempt in the House of Lords to annul the part pushing competitive tendering sadly failed.

The democratic and legal basis of the English NHS and the secretary of state's duty to provide comprehensive health services have now gone, and the framework that allows for wholesale privatisation of the planning, organisation, supply, finance and distribution of our health care is now in place.

If the NHS disappears health care will be ruled by big pharma and insurance companies; the main interest of the former is to make as much as possible, the main interest of the latter is to pay out as little as possible. Who will lose?

Who will hold NHS contractors like Serco to account?

It was almost two years ago that whistleblowers exposed the failings of the privatised out-of-hours GP service run by Serco in Cornwall. Yesterday, finally, they were vindicated. The powerful parliamentary public accounts committee summoned Serco and the NHS body responsible for commissioning them, the Cornwall primary care trust, and gave them the roasting they deserved for a culture of "lying and cheating" and for "shocking" inadequacies in writing and monitoring the contract. The committee had asked the National Audit Office to report on the service after revelations in the Guardian. Members from all parties were excoriating in their judgment of Serco's behaviour and the inability of the trust to hold the company, which has £2.4bn of public-sector contracts in the UK, to account.

A one off? A mistake? An accidental oversight by a morally upright company?

G4S and Serco face £50 million fraud inquiry - Serious Fraud Office investigates claims of over-charging for government contracts

Whitehall contracts running into billions of pounds are being urgently reviewed after the Government disclosed that two major firms had charged the taxpayer to monitor non-existent electronic tags, some of which had been assigned to dead offenders.

Perhaps not. It might be wise to question what lays behind recent 'NHS failings' and the apparent inability to address them.

Staff, deeply concerned that the service was an accident waiting to happen, went first to their managers, then their unions and professional bodies, and to the commissioner – and got nowhere. They went to local Lib Dem MP Andrew George, who asked the company and the trust to investigate but was fobbed off. They went to the regulator, the CQC, but it said it had no jurisdiction until a rule change in 2012 that required out-of-hours services to register with it. The strategic health authority, responsible for the trust until both were abolished in the coalition's upheaval of NHS structures, told MPs it didn't really do monitoring of out-of-hours services, that was the trust's business, even if the trust was failing.

...

The contract between Serco and the local NHS commissioners remains, outrageously, confidential, and freedom of information requests to have it released have been refused, as they are routinely in other privatised deals with public services. In this climate of secrecy, how can private companies be held to account?

This "post-code" lottery of health care really does bother me.

I done a quick check and discovered that NHS North Bristol does actually preform this procedure so I can only assume that the NHS trust this young boy is living in does not provide the procedure.

Its not about the NHS failing is about our political masters failing, more needs to be done to stop this post-code lottery of health, it creates huge inequalities.

The problem is it all comes down to money, each NHS trust has finite resources and in times of austerity things are only made worse, they have to decide what services they are going to provide. It all sadly comes down to a cost benefit, do they invest in providing selective dorsal rhizotomy or do they instead pay for a new X-Ray or MRI scanner?

This is the problem with the NHS in the 21st century, it simply cannot afford to pay for every treatment available

So no-one has donated yet?

Carry on with your political posturing, people.

No need to worry about what happens to the child.

reply to post by PheonixReborn


How do you know no-one has donated yet?

Some people don't like to publicise such things - and some people are simply not in the financial position to be able to.

Of course the well being and health of the child is the primary concern but the topic under discussion is the failings of the NHS, for whatever reasons, to provide the necessary treatment.