Monday 12 July 2010

ENTREPRENEURIAL DOCTORS.

Good grief, this is like another very bad dream. On Radio 4, following the news about the reorganising of the NHS , they spoke to a ' health care professional' in America, not clear what his position was but he was American , and so spoke as if he was an authority. He said, I kid you not, that many of their practitioners are ' highly entrepreneurial.' Quite what this means was not explained.
An ' entrepreneurial' doctor makes me quiver in my boots.
The new Conservative government, for that is what it is, are now embarking on an zero sum game, and copying unproven and eccentric free market ideas ( I hesitate to use that term 'ideas') from America largely and, oddly, Sweden, the ' free ' schools wheeze.
It is actually fairly radical stuff and completely alien and ill advised. They talked soft in the run up to the election, now they are in power some real teeth are showing. This is not Thatcherisim, its even more perverse.
This is serious dabbling in yet further privatisation just at a time when the purely private sector has been proven to be inadequate at delivering long term stability, socially and morally bankrupt and in need of firmer governance. Instead it looks like a decision to allow its tentacles to extend still wider into the previously clearly described public sector operations of the health service, the public education service and who knows what other areas is being undertaken, and this during a period of sustained under-employment and under-investment.
It is hard to comprehend where this revived ideological certainty has come from and its consequences could be seriously destructive, as were those of Thatcher and her caretaker Major.