Ideas such as Sajid Javid’s suggestion that patients should be charged for visiting GPs or hospital emergency departments show the Conservatives are “testing the water for a different kind of NHS”, Gordon Brown has said.
Writing in the Guardian, the former Labour prime minister says payment for services will end up with people missing early diagnoses and undermine the entire basis of the NHS.
Javid, the Conservative former health secretary, told the Times on Friday that the NHS could not “survive much longer” without radical change, including regarding some fee payments.
Javid, who will stand down as a Tory MP at the next election, cited as possible examples the fee of about £20 required of patients to see a GP in Norway or Sweden, and Ireland’s charge of €75 for people who arrive at a hospital A&E without a referral.
Javid’s intervention was, Brown wrote, “no accident”, noting that Rishi Sunak used the services of private healthcare and, when, campaigning to become prime minister, had proposed a charge for people who missed GP appointments.
“And so once again, as they did in opposition at the turn of this century, with alternative prescriptions [a 2002 Tory document on ways to finance the NHS], Conservatives are testing the water for a different kind of NHS.
Today’s Conservatives may have clapped [for] NHS nurses and health workers at the height of the pandemic; yet they are not only opposing decent remuneration for them but also contemplating a more privately financed healthcare system,” Brown wrote.
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/23/gordon-brown-warns-tories-two-tier-healthcare-system-charges-undermine-nhs