I’m at a loss as to the above choice of photograph to go with a story about the NHS.
Scottish Labour don’t know their Harris from their Elgin hospital?
Is Anas telling the joke about how he dodged the same sex marriage vote?
Enough of the laughs.
Scottish Labour has a plan?
OK, just that one last joke.
As you all know, UK Labour has plans (stop, I told you, be serious) and tells the Scottish MP what they are.
We know already. Here they are:
The last Labour Government reduced waiting times by using the private sector, increasing staff numbers and spreading good practice. We did this before. We will do it again. To end the threat of a two-tier health system, we will use spare capacity in the independent sector to ensure patients are treated quicker.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Mission-Public-Services.pdf
What do real researchers think of that?
Despite being championed by ministers and the Labour Party, private hospitals can only play a limited role in bringing down waiting times, a new study concludes.
The Government’s Elective Recovery Taskforce, which reports soon, has been tasked by ministers with ‘turbo charging’ efforts to cut waiting times by making more use of independent sector providers (ISPs), while Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State, Wes Streeting, called for ISPs to be used to cut the backlog of treatment.
The report from the Health Foundation concludes that greater use of the independent sector, while having an important role to play, will only have a limited impact on the NHS backlog and is no substitute for addressing wider issues such as staff shortages, social care and underfunding.
https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/greater-use-of-private-hospitals-will-have-limited-impact-on-nhs-backlog
What do the SNP plan (they can, they’re a real party) for the already best and least privatised NHS in the UK?
More of this: https://www.snp.org/healthier-scotland/
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
For my sins I happened to chance on a phon-in on Channel 5 (I know) and as it was asking should people who can afford it pay for their own treatment? I on my caught a small part of the discussion but there seemed support at least from the studio guests, an elderly Tory and a female Nina Myskow if I picked up correctly. Comparison was made with France where the health service is “much better” and people pay 30% of the treatment costs, but the state picks up 100% where patients are unable to afford it. It seemed to me very like Tories sounding out if their would be support for this as a step towards their ultimate goal of complete privatisation
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If private sector health providers are such a great idea,why do we have a publicly owned service?
In terms of bangs for your buck,the private sector has to make sufficient income to pay shareholders before it invests in service provision so,in theory,is less efficient than the public sector.
However,if your aim is political and trying to shift the burden from general taxation to individual medical insurance,then efficiency becomes irrelevant.
Tories claim that the private sector is more efficient because of competition.
Are we going to see multiple ambulance services competing for the same customer base and a plethora of hospitals etc etc?
Probably not but we will definitely see an increase in the number of wealthy health executives who will “benefit” the economy by shifting their income to offshore tax havens.
The only trickle down effect will be from Scotland’s presently persistent rain.
All we need to say to Labour about their plans is PPI.
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Labour have turned into a mirror image of the Conservative Party yes that Conservative Party who have been in power for about forty of the last fifty years in Westminster .
Labour now want more privatisation and quite like the idea of linking private involvement to the NHS so they can pay the private companies all the money but blame everything on the NHS.
Yup , that old trick , but it’s all that Labour have got , they’ve ran out of tricks we don’t know about.
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The last time I looked the American health service model sucked in 18% of GDP. It is little wonder that they are over here, room for big profits, similar attraction in the past with the food retail industry over here.
I can’t be the only one to notice the frequent use of “independent” sector, in place of private. Word branding? Independent = free of influence, august. Private = secretive.
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Hm.
Maybe we should campaign to privatise Scotland… 😀
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😊
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Good point Alan , nationalised industries were not perfect you won’t ever get perfect in business of any kind but nationalised industries were reliable we know that now looking back, the biggest enemy of nationalised industries were the government politicians who were secretly trying to damage them from the inside underfunding them collaborating with privatisation gurus for a backhander in their pocket , corrupt people who were tories in red much like we are seeing in the Labour Party right now.
There is not a single nationalised industry that has improved since privatisation not one , they have all had the lifeblood sucked out of them leaving a fragile shell of privatised business management riddled with fraud corruption profiteering poor service and incompetence that is the privatised model of the modern world, obscene profit for the few and poor service and wages for the many and they have the audacity to ask for government bail outs so they can repeat it all over again !
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