The Thatcherite legacy is not only the Tories Fault.

It really annoys me that Labour push themselves as the saviour of the NHS amongst other untruths.
That everything is Maggie's fault. Poor saps, they've never got over that woman and now there's another Tory female PM with a huge popularity rating.

Yes the Tories (but under John Major) introduced targets and with it an overburden of administrators to monitor adherence or not to the targets, but Labour did far more damage.

LABOUR'S Tony Blair was one of the most damaging Prime Ministers when it comes to the NHS. Saddling health trusts with expensive PFI deals that they are paying through the nose for, "reforming" GP contracts that just put up GP's salaries without any increase in cover and also allowing GPs to introduce expensive and impersonal out-of-hours services.

He also introduced no-win-no-fee legal access. In itself a great idea, ordinary people have access to legal redress and not worry about the expense. But the actual legacy is one of Ambulance chasers or Agressive lawyers suing everyone for the slightest thing.

Anna Racoon has started a crusade to enlighten people about the huge burgen that litigation has emburdened the NHS with. Out of a budget of £95Bn, £56Bn will be set aside for litigation. A wholly unsustainable situation where more is spend defending the NHS and settling lawsuits than is actually spent on medicine.

One of the big issues is the payments on these lawsuits is based on the victims of NHS procedures is based on the victim receiving further treatment privately, when the actual truth is they continue to receive treatment from the NHS that caused the issue in the first place.

In effect they bank the money and carry on getting free treatment. There is no mechanism to force people to use the money to get private treatment: the NHS doesn't have a mechanism for excluding people from treatment after suing them. There is also no mechanism to charge the person for treatment by the NHS, thereby getting that money back as the NHS treats them. there's no mechanism to get that money back if the victim dies: it becomes part of their estate. When in truth if they die, treatment ends and the reason for the money being provided ends. There is no clause to repatriate the money back to the NHS on their demise. The money is treated like a windfall for the family.

This dovetails into my previous blogs about the NHS spending millions on expensive cancer drugs, just to extend life expectancy by months, where that money can transform the lives of other patients for decades.

Tere needs to be more oversight of WHERE NHS money is being spent and most certainly SHOVELLING MORE MONEY AT THE NHS IS NOT THE SOLUTION.

Targets are not the solution. More targets means employing more staff to measure them: staff that are not employed in the business of care.

There needs to be an intelligent debate about the NHS budget, whether where it is going is delivering the best care for the country.

The media will dumb it down into a Labour/Tory public/private debate, when it really needs to be a more adult and detailed affair. As the people paying the bills, at the end of the day the media owe us a more accourate account of what is going on.