38 Degrees Petition – SUPPORT THE NHS REINSTATEMENT BILL TO BRING BACK OUR NHS

We have launched a petition calling on all MPs to attend the House of Commons on March 11th 2016 to support the NHS Bill.

Please do all you can to sign, share and support the petition.

Sign the Petition here

 

 

To: All Members of Parliament

Please attend the House of Commons on Friday 11th March 2016 for the second reading of the National Health Service Bill.

Please ensure that the Bill is debated and vote in favour of the Bill.

Why is this important?

The NHS in England is being dismantled. NHS services – including acute and emergency, children’s, elderly and maternity care – have been deliberately underfunded since 2010. The comprehensive care we’ve come to expect continues to be cut back.

Many services have been handed to private companies such as Virgin, Serco and US giant United Health, hiding behind the NHS logo. Valuable NHS buildings and land are being sold off to property developers, often as a result of the exorbitant costs of paying for new hospitals built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

These are our services and our assets. We the public own them. And polls repeatedly show that most of us want to keep our NHS.

Privatised services cost the NHS and tax payer far more than when provided by our publicly owned and publicly run NHS.

That is because public health systems don’t seek profits. They don’t need to pay dividends to shareholders. They don’t have the added costs of private sector loans. And they don’t have to pay the management fees that private companies charge.

A public NHS also doesn’t have privatisation’s heavy marketing and contract administration costs of extra lawyers, accountants and management – at least £4.5 billion annually on one estimate and rising. Just cutting them, not NHS services, would go a long way to cover the shortfall between government underfunding and the NHS’ needs over the next 5 years.

These huge commercial costs and the chaos caused by the ongoing NHS fragmentation are the direct result of privatisation. This is endangering the quality and safety of our public healthcare.

Privatisation isn’t just bad for the tax-payer. It’s bad for our health.

That is why we need the National Health Service Bill to remove the costs and waste of privatisation. The NHS Bill will reinstate the NHS as a proper public service. It is due to get its second reading in Parliament on Friday 11th March 2016.

MPs usually return to their constituencies on Thursday nights. We need them to stay in London for Friday, March 11th, to do everything they can to make sure the Bill is debated, and to vote in favour of the Bill so that it proceeds to the next stage.

The Bill was presented to Parliament in July 2015 by Caroline Lucas MP with the cross-party support of 77 MPs. It is backed by the Green Party and the SNP, as well as by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and other Labour MPs, one Plaid Cymru and one Liberal Democrat MP.

Please sign the Petition to show MPs that we, the public, want them to reinstate the NHS as a public service. It is their responsibility to do so.

And please write to your MP – whatever party she/he belongs to – stating your wish and urging him/her to back the Bill to bring back our NHS in England.

This Petition originates from the NHS Reinstatement Bill Group, which includes the Bill’s co-authors Professor Allyson Pollock and lawyer Peter Roderick.

 

Sign the Petition here