Repair and Restore the NHS for Runcorn, Frodsham, Helsby, Elton and Guilden Sutton. (This is NHS campaigners’ contribution to the debate in the Runcorn By-election and wil be upated during the campaign).

The Runcorn By-election comes at a time of anger over the state of public services including health and education, anger at the Government leaving the NHS with inadequate resouces and thereby causing deaths and making cuts at the expense of the poorest in society and those who literally need most help.

Keep our NHS Public expresses the anger (here) of most who campaign to restore and repair the NHS.

We are calling for a movement to demand the restoration and repair of the NHS. Privatisation has been a disaster for patients, staff, and the government’s spending. (Privatisation, in this sense, is the NHS paying for-profit companies to do medical work that the NHS previously provided.It’s not just charging patients)

We want, and demand this, of all the parties.

A fully funded national NHS, a fully staffed NHS, maternity care that respects and keeps women and babies safe, with no more hospital closures, a full GP service, dentistry for everyone, healthcare that manages winter well without corridor care and “boarding in“, mental health care brought back into the NHS. We want an NHS that is a good place to work. We need a good universal social care system. We want rid of privatisation and want a retun to the orginal model of the NHS without the big corporations.

Good healthcare is an excellent investment in the nation, repaying the cost in health, wealth and happiness, and financially with at least £3 return for each £1 invested. Even the world bank says “Investing in a country’s healthcare system is a strategic move that yields significant economic and social benefits, fostering a healthier, more productive workforce and contributing to overall national development and prosperity.”

The NHS was founded in July 1948 to be a national universal public service, providing the best available health care to all UK people. It was not designed to make money for big health corporations but to improve the health of the people, which it did for decades.

This model of healthcare once made the NHS the best health service in the world, in 2014 and in 2017.

The NHS was far more economical and effective than the US model.The ICB’s brought in in 2022 Act are modelled on the US Accountable Care Organisations.

The US model of healthcare is unacceptable; never mind what right wing parties say.

“The average annual health insurance premiums in 2024 are $8,951 for single coverage and $25,572 for family coverage. The average single coverage premium increased 6% in 2024 while the average family premium increased 7%. The average family premium has increased 24% since 2019 and 52% since 2014“.

In additon to what people in the USA pay for insurance and the many co-pays, the US government pays more per head of population than the UK does, with far worse outcomes, particularly for women and babies. Yet the US health corporations are influential in the semi-privatised NHS.

Over the last  15 years, this service has been damaged by  

• Real-terms funding cuts,
• privatisation,
• enforced competition between hospital trusts,
• damaging legislation (in 2012 and 2022), and reorganisation on the US model, all the time the governments are “advised” by big health corporations that preside over the worst healthcare in the advanced world in the USA.
• The increasing poverty and ill health of the people.
• The fabric of the hospital buildings has been neglected and we saw broken promises of new build hospitals.
• Cuts in the number of  hospital beds
• Poor workforce planning so we have fewer doctors per head of population than other advanced countries, yet we have unemployed GPs and hundreds of doctors facing unemployment in August.
• Outsourcing of services,  
• Services such as NHS dentistry are disappearing from many areas, and complex audiology is in severe trouble.
• Commissioning medical services from private companies. 

We have 6.24 million individual patients waiting to be treated, yet doctors are out of work, there is corridor care in A & E, locally we have the longest waits for admission to a ward in the country after being admitted through the A&E, and long ambulance waiting times. All this with staff overworked and underpaid. Billions are paid to outsourced for profit providers especially in mental health  

The NHS came from the people. They fought long and hard for it. From the miners of Tredegar, to the Women’s Cooperative Guild and many more, the fight for universal health care, was a long struggle. We must fight to win it back. Working class women played a big role in demanding healthcare and won some clinics but the demand was for care for everyone, from before birth to the grave and they did not stop till they won that health care. Our healthcare was never given to us by the rich. We had to fight for it.

Britain had appalling health care before World War 2. Trade Unions, especially in the mining towns, fought for healthcare for all in their areas. In some areas men were covered by workplace insurance (the panel), but not women or children. Even if a woman was employed and covered by insurance, maternity care was not included. The number of babies dying at birth was appalling, and women were more likely to die in childbirth than miners to die down the pit. Women’s groups fought for the right to health care for babies and women.

 On 5th July 1948, the NHS was founded and people could see the doctor even if they had no money; there was universal access to healthcare for the first time in the UK. The health of the nation, especially children and women giving birth, improved steadily until the governments brought in austerity.

This cartoon Charley your very good health, from the founding of the NHS is interesting even today.

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection.

The National  Health Service linked all the different kinds of treatments, all the hospitals, all the  GPs and clinics into a single organisation that allowed information and research to be shared freely.

 Cheshire and Merseyside NHS coordinated campaigns are formed by Keep Our NHS Public, Defend Our NHS, Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital, local Trade Union Councils and some union branches. We call on the government to ditch their pro-privatisation policies, to fund the NHS to European levels,and to move legislation to reinstate the fully public NHS.

 Please tell candidates you want to see the NHS restored and repaired. We saw the damage the conservatives did.  Reform’s leader has called for an insurance model for years, and the new government has failed miserably in averting the terrible winter crisis and the Maternity crises.