Tuesday 22 November 2016

Big Brother is Curing You

The database state has finally gone full Stalin. Unpeople like me can live without foreign travel or season tickets at swimming pools, but all of us at some point are going to require treatment under the NHS. I did just a few months ago, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/my-trip-to-dentist.html. A few years ago I destroyed all my documents of citizenship in protest against this kind of thing because I knew where it was heading, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/destroying-my-passport.html. Now finally a government official at the Department of Health, Chris Womald, has finally announced what they've been planning for a long time. He wants to introduce a scheme where NHS patients are forced to produce "two forms of ID" in order to receive treatment. This would be a passport and proof of address. This means when you turn up at accident and emergency, a GP's surgery or outpatient clinic the doctors and nurses will quite literally be snapping their fingers at you yelling "Papiere bitte!" This move is intended to cut down on "health tourism", in which foreign nationals come to Britain exclusively to have free treatment on the NHS to which they're not entitled. This kind of fraud costs the government £280 million last year. St George's Hospital in Tooting, London is already engaged in a pilot scheme to check the ID's of expectant mothers in its maternity unit. Meg Hiller, MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, happened to be the chairwoman of the committee where Womald trumpeted his clampdown announcement and she made a stand for the unpeople. It turns out that there are a number of my stateless sidekicks living in her constituency. "Because they have never travelled, they have no passport; they have no driving licence because they have never driven... Perfectly entitled to health care, British born, British resident; how are you going to make sure that people have access easily to the National Health Service without having to go through a very humiliating and impossible-to-meet set of demands?" A brilliant question which Womald really struggled to answer. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38060432. Basically Womald has no real plan. This is probably just signalling to his superiors before the Autumn Statement from the Treasury so he can go up the promotion ladder. However, the very fact it's being discussed seriously is a worrying sign. It wouldn't be the first time that what was formerly unthinkable becomes normal. Are we really going to get to a point where I will hop into A&E with my foot hanging off and will be told: "No ID?... Oh dear. Sorry, Mr Emlyn-Jones; we can offer you no treatment. You'll just have to go home... When the foot drops off just dip the stump in salty water."?
And: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/nhs-inpatients-charged-for-board.html.

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