DHSC has sick and elderly in its sights – asking public to comment on two options, but option of retaining current system of free prescriptions from age 60 is not on table
The government has the sick and frail in their sights. The Tories are getting ready to make sick elderly people – who, like so many, are already squeezed hard by massive and needless increases to living costs – pay for their prescriptions for an additional six years.
In typical Orwellian fashion, under banner images of people smiling at the prospect of being ripped off again, the government is asking the public to ‘Tell us what you think!’ between the two possible options on offer – but both of the options involve most people having to wait until the age of sixty-six before qualifying for the free prescriptions everyone currently gets from age sixty:
Either the government wants to take free prescriptions away even from millions currently receiving them and make them wait until they’re sixty-six before they get them again – or they’ll make everyone aged up to fifty-nine, who has been paying into the system in the full and justified expectation of qualifying at sixty, wait until they’re sixty-six. The poor paying for the arrogance and waste of the rich, yet again.
In other words, a smash-and-grab from some of those least able to afford it, just like the Tories infamously did to ‘WASPI’ women and their pensions – all at a time when living costs continue to rocket and life-expectancy is falling, supposedly on the basis that ‘the NHS will get more money’, as if NHS budgets aren’t easily affordable. money well spent and held down only by the politics of the government.
Tragically for the country, unlike Labour under Jeremy Corbyn the current main ‘opposition’ party has no intention of opposing the Tories over the NHS any more than over anything else, as Keir Starmer and his sidekick Wes Streeting have made abundantly clear, allowing the Tories emboldened to press on with such eugenicist evils unchecked.
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In 2011 the SNP abolished all prescription charges in Scotland
……with Labour support whilst the Tories and the LibDems both tried tried to block this.
It is also worth noting that the last Labour government had plans in place to abolish prescription charges in England for those with long term conditions but this was cancelled by the incoming Tory/LibDem administration.
Someone remind this site’s version of Alfred E. Neuman what year it is.
What’s on the LP policy table now, today Einstein? What was (ie past tense) the case then is no longer of relevance today after a decade and a half of; further de-industrialisation and financilaisation of the economy; increasing austerity; a distraction of a resource grab war; and an Overton Window so small its no longer possible to locate any difference between pig and man.
Its true what they say. You just cannot educate pork.
Yes that’s right….grin inanely, as we bleed every fucking one of you transparent so we already richer-than-Croesus can save a few pence.
How things haven’t turned very nasty on the streets already is beyond me.
Craig Murray…..
‘Twitter Ban’
I appear to have been banned from Twitter. For over a week I have not been able to log in to my account.
Every attempt to use the appeal mechanisms that exist when a twitter account is suspended or banned, are closed off by a message that the account does not exist and they have no record of my contact details, which is absolutely not true.
Over half the traffic to this website comes via twitter. On this website I express in mild and sometimes intellectual terms my dissent from the neoliberal world view.
In the past two years this has caused me to be jailed, to be interviewed about leaks on another matter by the Police, to be thrown out of the National Union of Journalists, to have two laptops stolen, to have my facebook account hacked and my twitter account blocked.
The warning bells for the freedoms of speech and dissent we took for granted in western society could not be ringing louder nor more clearly.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/01/twitter-ban/
I know that some of the drugs that are prescribed are quite expensive. But it was an eye opener in France where you pay the cost, not a prescription charge. Many of the prescriptions we were prescribed cost beteen £1 and £3. So what is the difference between the commercial cost of “normal” drugs, and the present prescription charge in England?
This is not the cost but a prescribed capped price in European countries. In UK big pharma is allowed to overcharge over 10,000 per cent above manufacture cost.
JoeRobson, I follow your argument and I think it is right to understand how the prescription charge is arrived at but if postage was charged at cost then mail sent within London would be pennies and that to the Scottish Islands many pounds. Of course I only want normal drugs (until I need the expensive ones) and if I’m rarely ill I might argue that I should pay less for the NHS but I think this would be divisive.
Free prescriptions are granted to ALL ages in Scotland, Wales and Ulster, from the majority taxpaying population of UK who live in England.
The prescription charge is for EACH medicine separately and so it not one charge but multiple ones.
Our new Over 50s party would have free prescriptions for all ages in England as well.
www dot over50sparty dot org dot uk
The majority tax paying population? Really? Did you know that Scotch whicky is taxed as though it were produced in London, or that Scotland “over” produces both green and hydrocarbon energy way beyond what it consumes, and of course the hydrocarbons are taxed as though they are produced in the middle of London? All of this, of course will become obvious once we have indpendence from the yoke of Westminster and the party leaders esconced down there.
The whole idea of dismantling the state is to take away state support, to make space for capitalists to make money from it. The excuse has always been that the state doesn’t have any money of its own and so can only spend what it raises in taxes. Neatly overlooking, how when the whole world banking system crashed we suddenly found mega billions, money never seen in our history before, just plucked out of thin air.
Quantitative Easing isn’t just emergency money created out of thin air to feed the banks, they produce money out of thin air every time they make a loan.
Our government is the issuer of the currency, it has to put money into the economy so that we and businesses can earn it.
What FAKE Neo-Liberal economists tell us is that we can only spend money raised in taxes, when at the same time they reduce taxation so that we can’t apply their logic for funding public services. What should be obvious to all by now is that this is the formula for cutting public expenditure and killing off public services; to make room for the privateers to profit.
This is what a real economist points out, as a country with its own currency we can never run out of money, ever! And there is nothing a government like ours can’t afford, how did we create nationalised industries, the NHS and state benefits with a national debt of 240% of GDP, when currently we can’t when it stands at 103%. Noting also that before the 2008 financial crash, the national debt stood at 34% of GDP, worsened by 12 years of austerity, which it was supposed to cure.
Professor Stephanie Kelton, showing Alan Greenspan the then chair of the Federal Bank rebuffing conservative claims that benefits are better provided in the private sector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veCAN9Mmaws
But when are people going to realise that Neo-Liberal politicians of all colours need to go with their fake economics?
Under Corbyn, Labour pledged to abolish prescription charges altogether. The cost is around £600 million. The government could easily afford that.
Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said:
“”But even though many of our most vulnerable patients are already exempt from standard prescription charges, the fact that fees exist in England means there is real risk that some people might not obtain and take the medication they need.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49770581