Yes,
everyone likes good medical service. The questions here are: how much will it
cost, and why only for over-75s?
GPs have been very unwilling to work on weekends, which is another
government commitment, and are already very busy taking on extra work
commissioning all healthcare, which the Conservatives forced them to do in
their latest bull-in-china-shop escapade with the NHS. GPs complain about being
overworked, and many chose to be GPs because of the work-life balance (hospital
doctors have to work demanding shift patterns and be on-call, at least until
they become senior consultants). If GP contracts do not already force them to
work extra time they’ll extract a heavy price for being forced to do so, and
even then it might actually have to be in the form of more GPs to do the extra
work. It takes 10 years to train a GP, so the Conservatives probably won’t be
delivering that part of the policy any time soon. As I predicted when first
drafting this, GPs think this policy is bonkers.
The over-75s are presumably a priority group because they’re more
likely to be in urgent need of care. But we already have a way to describe
people in urgent need: we call them ‘emergencies’, or ‘people in urgent need’.
Why would we limit it to old people? To make them realise that they’ll benefit
when they think about who they’ll vote for. It helps a benefit impinge on
people’s consciousness when it’s defined as being for them, rather than for a
situation that they might find themselves in but hope not to.
In addition to excluding
many urgent cases, this measure will help ensure inefficiency by giving 75
year-olds the ability to disrupt GPs’ schedules even if it’s just loneliness or
hypochondria. This policy takes us back to the worst of Labour’s target-driven
NHS.
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