Who are the BMA and why are they opposed to the NHS reforms. Why are the BBC so supportive of them both?

All day the BBC have had representatives of the BMA on the radio, television and quoted on the web news explaining why the government's reform of the NHS is a bad idea and that hospitals will have to close, patient care will be compromised and treatment rationed by this risky restructuring.

So who are the BMA? Are they impartial observers whose only interest is the welfare of the NHS? Of course not, the BMA are part of the TUC of the NHS. There prime interest in this matter is to protect the interests of their members. When I say 'interests' I mean of course income, for the government's proposals may, if they work and are allowed to work, end the many 'Spanish practices' in the NHS, the over-generous overtime and replace them with a degree of competition.


The BBC sees itself as the protector of socialised medicine in the UK and will not accept any criticisms of the hard-working staff in the NHS. This morning 5Live were obsessed by the idea that David Cameron had let slip that he thought the NHS was (in some regards) second-rate; I think he was just talking about the UK's cancer survival rate. This comment was just not acceptable to the BBC; why? My interactions with the NHS have generally shown it to be second-rate at best. I have experienced incorrect diagnoses, had injuries inflicted upon me (and indeed Mrs NotaSheep) as a result of doctors' carelessness, spent hours in A&E waiting to see a doctor and watching the inefficiency that surrounded us, spent a night in an A&E ward kept awake by chatting nurses at the nurses station, watched my blood being smeared across the tunic of a nurse after she gave me an injection and then watched her wander off to the next patient... The NHS is not 'the envy of the world' and I blogged examples previously.

Here's something I wrote  in August 2009:

'The "envy of the world" is of course nothing of the sort. If it was then other countries would have copied the NHS, but which have?

If you have had the misfortune to spend any time in a NHS hospital then you would know all about the dirt, the uncaring nurses and the overwhelming sense that the hospital would run so much better if it wasn't for the pesky patients. The "deep clean" was Labour spin. A October 2007 EU wide survey ranked Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction.

As I wrote in 2007:

'A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.


But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free? True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, but you can't so - a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.


If the NHS was indeed "the envy of the world" then not only would much of the rest of the world have copied it but there would be little demand for expensive private medical insurance. That few (if any countries) have copied it and that there is great demand for private medical insurance speaks volumes. '