Daily Archives: January 5, 2017

Britain, Government, Health, Politics

Why are we letting the whole world use our health service?

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

health-tourism

The National Health Service is under considerable strain. It is not an international health service providing a worldwide service.

LAST year foreign patients left the NHS with an unpaid bill of almost £30million.

That is nearly double the amount for the previous year and clear evidence that action must be taken to clamp down on health tourism.

The NHS, as the Department of Health has rightly said, is a national health service not an international one.

There is simply no way that the British taxpayer can afford to pay for the rest of the world to come here and access treatment.

It would of course be inhumane to turn away anybody in need of emergency care while they are in this country.

But that is not to say that the NHS is obliged to treat for free any individual who happens to suffer from a minor illness or requires non-urgent treatment while on British soil.

For all the tough talk we are continuing to offer healthcare worth huge sums of money to people who have no right to it.

An explosion in demand is putting the NHS under increasing pressure.

This is not purely the result of health tourism but stopping people from overseas from accessing free treatment should be easy.

That ministers allow them to keep getting away with it is worrying. We are not a country that should be providing free-for-all.

We need the Government to put British taxpayers first and stop others from abusing our health service.

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Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Terrorism, United Nations, United States

The West has a responsibility in Iraq

mosul

Mosul: Violence in Iraq continues to escalate.

IRAQ

Intro: Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end.

Violence still engulfs Iraq. The United Nations has said that at least 6,878 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2016, a number that is most certain to be on the low side because of the unverifiable number of civilian deaths in war zones. And we do not know the full death toll from the ongoing fighting in that country because the Iraqi government has not published the causality figures for government troops and paramilitary forces fighting in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq. It is a tragic toll.

In December alone, 109 civilians perished and 523 injured in Baghdad. These are largely attributed to Islamic State who have claimed responsibility for a string of bombings. But, as IS get shifted out of Mosul and other areas they have controlled, the bombings will only get worse. Fanatics will carry on the fight on the streets of the country’s cities.

Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end. Along with the United States we were at the forefront of the regime change invasion of Iraq that has unleashed such a violent insurrection since. Britain cannot be allowed to wash its hands as if now the mayhem has nothing to do with them. It does.

The conclusions of the Chilcot Inquiry found many failings of the UK but was specifically critical of the way in which the U.S. dismantled the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein’s army, as well as describing the whole invasion as a strategic failure. Whilst the immediate violence is largely being perpetrated by IS and its fanatics, the West could have served the Iraqi people much better after getting involved.

It is always difficult to stand back and watch merciless dictators with no compunction committing butchery on their own people, but the long-term costs of not thinking through action from the start is now all too clear. Western intervention and the lack of proper military plans in Iraq – in dealing with all that has happened since that ill-fated invasion of 2003 – explains much of what we are witnessing now. Hideous incompetence.

A lesson we still seem not to have learnt in Syria.

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