Forget the spin – new English NHS bill is all about cutting our right to healthcare

 

all know the NHS has a huge backlog. As things stand, it will struggle to meet its legal obligations to provide us with the healthcare we need for the years ahead.

The government faces a simple choice. It can either support the NHS to meet those obligations – ideally in a way that improves its long-term sustainability. Or it can reduce those obligations – reduce our rights to access healthcare.

New English health secretary Sajid Javid claims that his goal is to “build a better NHS and bust the backlog”. But experts who’ve pored over the detail of the new Health and Care Bill, published last week and due for its second reading in Parliament tomorrow, have spotted alarming signs that the bill will follow the latter strategy.

That it will “bust the backlog” by further reducing the government’s obligations to secure NHS care for us all – and our ability to get that care.

It’s a direction of travel the government has been on for some time. But this bill goes far further – even, according to the lawyer Peter Roderick and public health doctor Allyson Pollock, removing the current legal duty to arrange the hospital care people need, from surgery and consultant care to physiotherapy.