Brown betrays the working class with latest Healthcare proposals

The New Labour government of Gordon Brown has unveiled its latest commitment to the destruction of the National Health Service, that is the commercialisation of critical treatments disguised as a gesture for patients rights. The new responsibilities of the National Health Service include:

• An operation within 18 weeks of patients first seeing their GP
• A free health check-up for all at the age of 40
• Treatment from an NHS dentist
• Die at home if they suffer from a long-term medical condition
• See a cancer specialist within two weeks
• Be treated in accident & emergency departments within four hours.

It is the first and penultimate pledges where the government seeks to allow the encroachment of the private sector onto an already burdened NHS instead of actually improving it and providing for the next generation of healthcare that is equitable, efficient, and free at the point of need. The proposals allow, and in some cases would necessitate, the use of private sector treatment where NHS care is lacking, paid for by the government budget. Cancer patients and those in need of operations could be forced to use private healthcare services instead of their right to access on the National Health Service.

In fact, the British Medical Association, which is holding its annual conference in Liverpool this week, will be tabling an industrial-action motion which could provoke strike action over the governments proposals to widen private sector involvement in the health service. While the doctor's leaders are begging for them to back down, the physicians mood is militant and they can see clearly that what these new plans mean is the beginning a large-scale corruption of the NHS by the private sector.

The NHS was a hard-fought gain made by the working class and pioneered by its political organisation, the Labour Party. That was over 60 years ago. To see a Labour government opening up the health service to market forces in a way which Lady Thatcher would never have dared is truly outrageous and a clear betrayal to the working-class base of the Labour Party. And yet this is just one in a string of anti-Socialist, anti-working class measures taken by the New Labour government.

What is needed is a return to the principles of the NHS, to an equitable society, to socialism!