Wiritng for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog today, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg welcomes Labour’s U-turn on NHS top-up payments:
The rules that forced patients to pay the full cost of their NHS care if they chose to use their own savings for an expensive but life-saving drug were clearly unsustainable. Worse, the rules were inhuman and unjust.
Nobody pretends that it isn’t a difficult issue, but it is unacceptable to continue to deny people the right to top up their care, particularly where they are following their doctor’s advice. …
There must be no fragmentation of care; those who pay for top-ups should not take away from the NHS, it must not pave the way for queue-jumping in the NHS. Any impression that the NHS is subsidising private care must be avoided, and we must not allow the NHS to shrink to provision of a few basic services. …
Today’s announcement is an important step to a more liberal NHS: one that truly values choice. However, the challenge is to avoid this undermining the important principle of equity and to ensure that it goes hand-in-hand with much-improved access under the NHS to life-saving drugs routinely available overseas.
You can read the full article here.
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2 Comments
As I said about this last night there is some welcome stuff in here but we really need to be looking at the pricing of drugs and what we are going to propose to do about it…
The full article, and several perceptive replies on the Guardian website, are worth reading.
I am pleased to see that Nick Clegg at least now recognises belatedly that this move, which he first called for, seriously threatens to introduce a two-tier health service. As he says, there is now a big challenge to try to ensure that it does not.
Amazingly, it seems to be left to the Tories to stand firm against this!