Starmer’s NHS Waiting List Rigging Gets Blown Wide Open!

Right, so Starmer’s Labour caught up in yet another scandal Damo, they have one of those almost as much as they send more money to Ukraine Damo you might be thinking already and it’s a fair point they do seem to end up in hot water more often than a laundrette and this time its over the NHS, because they’ve been telling some major porkie pies about NHS waiting lists, but worse, it seems a bit of bribery of our General Practitioners might actually be involved, because nothing fixes waiting lists faster than making sure more people don’t get added to them.
Not only does this obviously put lives at risk, it destroys trust between GP and patient if the patient can’t be sure their GP actually has their best interests at heart, this latest scandal now having been brought to light is seeing GPs getting £20 per patient that they don’t refer, incentivising GPs to withhold care and the reduction in waiting lists being artificially engineered at the expense of the lives of ordinary working class people.
Under Starmer’s Labour and his weasel of a health secretary Wes Streeting, you have two MPs having taken massive donations from private health interests, who have integrated more private health provision in line with US healthcare models – integrated care systems acting as gatekeepers to deny patients treatment - overseeing an NHS that might still be free at point of use, but is being hollowed out from within, systematically dismantled through privatisation, rationing of healthcare and outright deception.
Starmer and Streeting are prioritising private profits over patients, embedding corporate interests in the NHS, and forcing through dangerous reforms that threaten the very foundation of universal healthcare, reforms Streeting is on record as saying we either accept or he’s prepared to see the NHS die. Free at point of use, isn’t the same as free, if its costing us all more by stealth so private profits balloon, we’ll have let the NHS die ourselves.
Right, so under the guise of "reducing pressure on hospitals," the government has introduced a scheme, and by scheme I mean scam that is offering GPs £20 for every patient they do not refer to secondary care, ie for specialist treatment, off to hospital you know what I mean. Now Labour would love to dress this up as about efficiency, they’d love you to think that is all it is about, but if you’re introducing cash incentives for GPs to not refer, bribery and corruption in my view as that is, well there will certainly be some unscrupulous GPs, perhaps some in practices particularly hard up, that will do so. I would hope their oaths would mean more to them, but this is what this is, it is not about efficiencies at all, it is a financial incentive to deny care.
This is dangerous for several reasons of which some will be obvious but others lend themselves towards making Labour policy a reality, by crook more than hook.
Overwhelmingly the most toxic part of this is that it will undermine trust in GPs. The doctor-patient relationship relies on trust. Patients have to trust their doctor will do whatever is in their best interests, but if patients suspect their GP is withholding referrals for profit, that trust is going to evaporate
On top of that, the refusal to refer in the case of someone absolutely should have been referred, won’t make waiting lists go away, it’ll screw up treatment responses for various conditions, when matters worsen for a given patient and it becomes obvious. Questions could then be asked, why no referral before now, which could GPs in a pile of hot water, something I doubt has escaped them, but the damage is done with the trust being broken down, with patients being made more suspicious of their doctors. Delayed diagnoses & worsening conditions – many serious illnesses, the one that will spring to mind most immediately for most of us I would imagine being cancer, requires swift referral. Delays mean progression, suffering, and avoidable deaths.
And why are Labour doing this? A false solution to waiting lists – Instead of funding more hospital capacity, the government is hiding demand, not reducing it, swearing blind it is getting the lists down but doing so not by improving treatment or health outcomes, but by cooking the books.
This is not about improving healthcare—it is about manipulating statistics to claim success while patients inevitably pay the price.
Now the groundwork for all of this has been being rolled out for a while now, the so-called and the much-criticised Integrated Care Systems or ICS’s, which are modelled on US-style managed care, in other words profits first, treatment second if you get treated at all.
UnitedHealth, for example, is one of America’s largest private insurers, their CEO famously having been shot by Luigi Mangione is deeply embedded in the NHS, and their new CEO, Andrew Witty, has been openly admitting its role is to "prevent unsustainable health treatment.”
Well what does he mean by "Unsustainable Treatment" then? If you need treatment, you need treatment and thaty’s wht the NHS is for right? Not if things carry on like this.
In the US, insurers deny care to maximise profits. Now, ICS’s are doing the same. One part of this is something called self care, which is just the most callous concept in healthcare. Fix yourself basically.
There is a push for self-care from labour and amid these ICS’s instead of medical treatment as we’re all suddenly qualified to treat ourselves apparently, but treatment could be withheld until we’ve tried to deal with it at home and only after we’ve failed to, who knows? Check our own prostates now? Will somebody see us, perhaps when its too late.
ICS’s stand for Integrated Care Services, It should stand for Prioritising cost-cutting over patient need. It is privatisation by stealth.
All of this is part of Wes Streeting’s10-year plan which involves closely aligning with the Darzi Report, which came out last year, which advocates shrinking NHS services to create profit opportunities, making more profits for offering less treatment. Former MP Claudia Webbe has warned in a piece she penned for the Morning Star that this plan is a danger to us all and yet Labour is ploughing ahead. Here’s an excerpt:
‘In his report, Darzi lavishes praise on Tory health policy, particularly the 2014 Five Year Forward View, its subsequent continuation, and the statutory rubber-stamping of the US accountable care organisation (ACO) system, which can be more accurately described as “cuts for cash” and was subsequently renamed integrated care systems (ICS) after bad publicity over US ACOs…
The Conservatives’ ACO push has always claimed to be derived from these “changing needs of the population,” but as the constant drive to ration services, cut costs and lower the NHS workforce skill mix shows, the real driver has been increasing potential profitability…
In praising the 2014-onwards ACO policy, Darzi approvingly cites “pilots of integrated care [that] were well under way in 2010,” without mentioning that these pilots were set up by Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealth based on the minimised state healthcare model they practiced in the US.’
US healthcare being pushed and being behind reforms designed to maximise profit whilst minimising care.
Key Elements of Darzi’s appalling plans include hospital closures as part of a drive to centralise services which will mean the shutting of local hospitals, forcing longer journeys for care. Those blasted self-care mandates came from Darzi as well, pushing patients to treat themselves instead of seeing doctors or being referred and of course the privatisation Expansion, resulting in more contracts handed to firms like UnitedHealth and others, lobbying MPs and of course making donations to them. Well there’s a segue if ever I made one.
Starmer and Streeting’s claim to be saving the NHS, yet Labour’s frontbench between them has taken over £650,000 from private health firms, which is even more than the Tories have.
Starmer has taken over £157,000 from private health, Streeting more than £193,000 and others who have taken significant sums include Yvette Cooper who has taken more than £231,000 and Angela Rayner who has taken £50,000.
On top of the lobbyists cash, there have been the appointments to key roles within Starmer and Streeting’s NHS reforms.
Samantha Jones is the ex-boss of health privatising firm Operose and she is now running the Department of Health and overseeing Streetings ridiculously damaging 10 year plans is Tom Kibasi who used to work for McKinsey, one of the key NHS privatising firms under the Tories.
These are not the sort of people you recruit to save the NHS, they are privatisation enforcers.
Starmer’s government is not fixing the NHS—it is breaking it. From bribing GPs to deny care, to embedding US-style rationing of care, to flooding hospitals with underqualified staff like Physicians Associates and Anaesthetist Associates, who are not qualified doctors, every move is prioritising profit over patients.
The NHS belongs to the people as the Labour Party that created it intended—not corporations, not politicians of the sort we find in the Labour Party today, who would have Nye Bevan spinning in his grave. Free at point of use isn’t free and is of no use to us once it has gone from being a care giving non profit entity, to a profit driven, care withholding corporate mess. If we do not resist what is being done to the NHS by Labour now, continuing where the Tories left off, we may lose it forever.
The NHS is not safe in Labours hands and redoubling down on that point is the fact Streeting has brought back an old Blairite health secretary turned private healthcare lobbyist back into government, the warning signs just keep going off folks, get all the details of that story n this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch. Please do also hit like, share and subscribe so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new daily content as well as supporting the channel at the same time which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working class people and I will hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.