02.11.1995

Health chiefs play god

The Queen’s speech on November 11 will detail cuts in benefit and attacks on welfare. The new cutting consensus is agreed on one thing - our health must be rationed

FREE, universal health care will become a relic of the past unless we fight now for our rights.

Top doctors and health officials attended a secret meeting at the end of September, where they plotted to establish a national framework for ‘rationing’ NHS treatment. Naturally, they have presented this attack on our health as a so-called common sense measure.

The list of 35 participants at this secret conference, which was initiated by the NHS executive, reads like a rogue’s gallery of health bureaucrats and government stooges.

The conference was addressed by Ron Zimmern, number one villain for many people at the moment. Why? Zimmern is director of public health for Cambridge and Huntingdon health commission, which took the decision to deny treatment to the 11-year old leukaemia sufferer Jaymee Bowen, better known as “Child B”.

Understandably, Jaymee announced on the BBC’s Panorama programme that she would like to “whack” the health service manager who refused to fund her treatment. The money needed to treat Jaymee effectively came to the awesome sum of £75,000, which is clearly far too expensive for the NHS of the 1990s. Life comes cheap nowadays.

This appears to be the conclusion of the secret conference. Nick Ross, the BBC broadcaster who chaired the event, claimed: “There was complete agreement that rationing is inevitable.” Zimmern outlined the future to come, which will see the ‘rationing’ of homeopathy, psychotherapy, ‘non-urgent’ surgery and beta interferon, the new but costly drug which offers hope to multiple sclerosis sufferers.

The Berkshire health authority has decided to limit services such as plastic surgery, in a sordid attempt to save £7 million. In reality, more and more hospitals are resorting to upper age limits for treatment.

Routine breast cancer screening stops at 65, which is just when women are most likely to benefit. Some 2,000 women over that age die of the disease each year, and those who die waiting for treatment are likely to be older.

We must vigorously oppose all and any voices which tell us that rationing is ‘unavoidable’. The Guardian, supposed defender of the NHS and the welfare state, recently informed us:

“No matter how big or small the size of the national cake, rationing decisions will still have to be made, as the harrowing tale of Child B graphically illustrates ... Every £75,000 spent on alleviating leukaemia is £75,000 not spent elsewhere: choices have to me made” (October 27).

Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes. The government and the bosses will never give us the health system we need, and deserve. We have to fight for it, and the fight begins by rejecting all talk of ‘rationing’ and market-driven ‘reforms’. They are bad for your health.