I’m 100% against the restructuring of the NHS, but that graph you’ve used there is pretty misleading. Why are the ‘strong feelings’ placed on top of the figures they’re already a part of?

“32% of Brits felt that the NHS delivers ‘about the same level of care as the health services of most other countries in Europe’
29% felt that NHS healthcare was ‘better’ than that of other countries
Only 23% said that they thought the NHS was worse than elsewhere in Europe.”

How many of these people have been to other countries?

Earth to Lie Dems , Earth to lie Dems come in please…….

How many more tory policies are you going to surrender to before you get a grip?

Steff – the oppose column is 37% moderately opposed (blue), plus 16% strongly opposed (cream). Same goes for the others.

Sunny I think you’ve misunderstood the statistics. Only 21% moderately oppose, with 16% strongly opposed, which adds up to 37%. At the moment your graph adds up to 122%.

ooops – well spotted, will amend that now.

i work in the NHS and am leaving to work in private sector because i am young and ambitious. With the pay and job freeze on at the moment there is no room to advance and it seems like every time a temporary worker (who get paid more and basically cost more and fill permanant roles) gets fired they carve the work up amongst 2 or 3 other people… no pay rise nothin..

The conservsatives do not care about carving up the NHS, for those of you older than me i’m sure this seems familiar. i suppose we will all just help each other out and not get ill or be a victim of crime to help out in the big society.

I’m in shock – I thought from the news coverage of the plans that the opposed figure would be much higher (note to self – media types are no better at you then picking the public mood – i.e. hopeless).

If this is basically a three-way split between change, keeping it as it is and blank shrug. It is particularly interesting when you look at the actual data – unsurprisingly Liberal Democrat voters are not in love with this idea (anyone else noticed how Liberal Democrat voters are often very conservative…) but only 60% of Conservative voters (56% of those who voted Conservative) support the idea and only 56% of both current and at the last election Labour voters actually oppose the idea. Also, the breakdown of figures by age, gender, social class and region all look broadly simililar for a change (OK – Scotland is more opposed, old people are happier (counter-intuitive?) but nothing even comparable to the not over-marked voting intention differences say). Anyone who sees a clear dividing line here may need to consider that the ‘religion’ of the NHS seems less evident in these figures than we have been led to expect, which is all to the good – it seems that the representative sample of the population (unlike politicians and media) seem to accept that we can actually discuss things like how healthcare is best delivered.

When the NHS was founded after the 2nd World War there was a clear mandate for the Attlee government to deliver on their promise about health care for all from cradle to grave.

This time with the reconstructing that the Tories want there is no such clear mandate and the public were not told about the Tory ideas beforehand. This is not what I would call a choice in democracy but something which is being rammed down our throats for political reasons.

Steve M – have to agree with you on that point. Regardless of whether the proposals work or not (I for one hope they do work, although there seems to be some who would rather people suffer in squalid conditions just so they can say ‘Tories are to blame’), it would have been nice to have seen them before the election as it promises to be quite a radical change to the way the NHS will work.

I am totally against the proposed plans for the NHS. It will be expensive to implement, each GPwill need accountants etc, etc. If you give too much power to the GP’s, who are all different, some good, some not, it will be like schools, the public will be changing GP’s to get better treatment and even will move to get a good one. Leave it as it is!. It works well and stop privatizing parts of our NHS. It got better and better under Labour, do not destroy all they did do simply for show. Be brave enough to say that they did a good job in this at least.