“So clearly when you have a barely “real terms increase” and then take £2.448bn out of it”…

…it still adds up to more than Labour would spend on the NHS

And they lie, and lie and lie and lie.

it still adds up to more than Labour would spend on the NHS

How so? For a start under Labour there would have been £1.8bn more per year, or are you suggesting that that amount of money is trivial?

Lansley’s vanity re-organisation is a nonsense, it is re-inventing the wheel. For example, several of the new “pathfinder” GP consortia are made up of all the GPs in their current PCT, one has even said that when they have signed the contracts for the offices they will even move into the PCT’s offices. The new NHS commissioning board will be headed by Sir David Nicholson, the current Chief Exec of the NHS. Many of his civil servants will move with him to this new organisation. Since they will have to make commissioning decisions about GP consortia, they will need to have a local presence. Like 10 regional offices. Just like the current SHAs. Lansley is not abolishing PCTs and SHAs, he is just renaming them.

Why spend £1.8bn to re-create what’s already there?

It is certainly looking like Lansley is setting himself up for a very expensive mistake, and he’ll destroy our NHS in the process.

This demonstrates unmistakably the true state of our faux-democracy. The government instigates a “consultation”. In the “consultation” their views are roundly and soundly trounced. Nevertheless they go ahead, completely ignoring the result of the “consultation”. Public relations man to his cloven hooves, Cameron has devised a sham democratic process just for appearance’s sake.

Look beyond the government’s claims about billions being spent on the NHS. This is what is happening on the ground:

Testimony from Katherine Murphy (Patients Association) to the HoC Health Committee on Tueaday 7 December 2010:

“From the Patients Association’s point of view and from what we hear from the members of the public and our own members who call our helpline on a daily basis, this is incredibly confusing from a patient’s point of view. The scale of the restructure is happening so quickly. It is already having an impact on patients because many GPs up and down the country are already getting ready for consortia. There are patients who are already being told that their operations have been postponed. Indeed, last week we had a call from a senior nurse from the north of England who said that over the past three weeks she had seen five patients who should have been referred for pain services but whom she was unable to refer because she had been told that she cannot refer to the appropriate service. So there is already an impact on patients. We’ve also heard from a number of patients around the Warwickshire area who were due to have hip replacements within the next couple of weeks. They have been postponed and they haven’t been given a new date for their operation. So it is a concern for patients. Very often, patients and the public do not understand with health care who is actually responsible for the commissioning of care, and also at the Patients Association we feel that it is unnecessary for patients to have to worry about whether the care is going to be commissioned and whether they are going to get the appropriate care.”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmhealth/uc513-v/uc51301.htm

I still don’t understand the need for such change in this financial climate.

Oh Silly Sally. it is shock doctrine of course. Ram it through when the public is looking at something else.

The Lie Dems could have sat back and said to the tories , “go on then form a minority govt and set a budget and we see if we will back you. But you aren’t getting anything else. “ Let the tories swing in the wind. But no, Clegg the liar in Chief decided to sell out many of the people who voted for him, just so that he can have a picture of himself as deputy Prime Minister over his bed.

Clegg ,you mat call your self Deputy Prime Minister, but you are as near to Prime Minister as the guy who sweeps the downing street step.

What ever the Tories do is ideologically driven. This is about introducing competition and reducing the bill for the state, quality of care is secondary. You can’t have a war without casualties?

This is about introducing competition and reducing the bill for the state

Err, no. It’s about introducing the private sector to public sector guaranteed handouts (viz. PFI).

“Err, no. It’s about introducing the private sector to public sector guaranteed handouts (viz. PFI).”

Err, no. It’s about Cameron’s attractive pledge made in the run-up to the election in May this year:

“David Cameron has denied that ‘tough’ decisions on spending will mean cuts to frontline health services while campaigning in marginal seats he needs to win to secure overall victory.” Nursing Times, 4 May 2010
http://www.nursingtimes.net/whats-new-in-nursing/news-topics/conservative-party/cuts-wont-hit-frontline-nhs-insists-cameron/5014238.article

This was a Telegraph news report on 4 December 2010:

“Across swathes of the country, patients waiting for the most common types of surgery, including hip and knee replacements, and cataract operations, will now be forced to wait months longer for treatment.

“Patients’ groups described the decisions as ‘desperate’, warning that thousands of people, especially the elderly, will be left to suffer in pain this winter as their conditions deteriorate.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8181390/Patients-denied-hip-surgery-and-fertility-treatment-amid-NHS-cash-crisis.html

In another thread last week, I posted about a phone call from a friend to say that she had had a private eye cataract operation the previous day because her scheduled NHS cataract operation had been postponed again, this time to March next year, and she is of an age when her driving licence has to be renewed shortly.

Such are the immediate human and personal financial costs of the government’s grand schemes for the NHS.

There is a lot of concern about the lack of detail in the Lansley plans about how the reformed NHS will handle those with rare medical conditions like muscular dystrophy:

http://www.muscular-dystrophy.org/get_involved/campaigns/campaign_news/3120_concerns_over_lack_of_detail_about_muscle_disease_services_in_new_nhs_proposals

Anyone concerned to reform the NHS in a pragmatic way would surely start by working out how the reforms will work for people with serious conditions like Duchenne muscular dystrophy. That these plans treat people with such conditions as an afterthought is the clearest indication we have that this government is driven by ideology not pragmatism.

Are the LIb Dems going to sit there and let this happen?

So clearly when you have a barely “real terms increase” and then take £2.448bn out of it, that does not mean “real terms” at all. To echo Ed Miliband in the Commons this afternoon, this is yet another broken government promise.

That ‘clearly’ is doing a lot of work. If there’s a cash increase of £90bn, translating into a real terms increase of £9bn (using your figures above), then even removing £2.5bn leaves £6.5bn. You know, a billion here and a billion there and soon we’re talking real money. By way of comparison, the total IHT take is £2.2bn.

It all depends on how much of the NHS budget gets absorbed in dealing with reorganisation and treating a ageing population during a hard winter, doesn’t?

As for the looming reorganisation of the NHS following the abolition of the Primary Care Trusts, try this from the FT:

The chief executive of one of Britain’s biggest private hospital groups says: “If I went to my board and said that I’d told my senior management that I was merging all their posts before making them redundant in two years’ time; that I’d told all my finance people they too will be going; and that I was going to get some other people to run the business; and that while I can’t yet define it precisely, it will involve the nurses – well, I think it would be me who was out of a job.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5c23dda2-07b7-11e0-a568-00144feabdc0.html#axzz18EyZTvgn

If there’s a cash increase of £90bn

Tim J, you misread the original article. That 90 billion amount is the total spend, not the nominal cash increase. The nominal increase will be less than 3 billion, and the real terms increase (before the offsets called out in the article) much less than 0.5 billion.

(90 billion is 7.5% of GDP, near enough.)

13 – the dangers of posting from a sickbed…

[13] “7.5% of GDP” – still slightly more than Thatch spent on health, but give the coalition time?

@11. Tim J

That ‘clearly’ is doing a lot of work. If there’s a cash increase of £90bn, translating into a real terms increase of £9bn (using your figures above), then even removing £2.5bn leaves £6.5bn. You know, a billion here and a billion there and soon we’re talking real money. By way of comparison, the total IHT take is £2.2bn.

The ways that the Tories always show that their plans are superb is by:

1) give the increase over 5 years and not mention the time scale
2) completely ignore inflation
3) completely ignore the top slicing

The figures given above were from John Appleby, economist at the Kings Fund (an independent organisation). However, the figures are also backed up by analysis by the House of Common’s library – which John Healey announced in the Commons at the time of the CSR, since then the OBR has said that their projection for inflation is higher.