Name Of Committee Mental Health Act Scrutiny Committee: Fill & Download for Free

the complete story,The Americanisation of the NHS is not something waiting for us in a post-Brexit future. It is already in full swing. Since 2017 Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) have been taking over the purchasing as well as the provision of NHS services, deciding who gets which services, which are free and which – as with the dentist and prescriptions – we have to pay for. Known in the US as Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs), ICSs are partnerships between hospitals, clinicians and private sector providers designed – and incentivised – to limit and reduce public healthcare costs, and in particular to lessen the demand on hospitals. Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs), the forerunners of ACOs, were pioneered by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser was a model for his planned NHS reforms. When a trial of ACOs was announced in the UK in 2017, it caused an outcry from campaigners and NHS England quickly rebranded them ICSs. But the Kaiser model isn’t new to healthcare policy in the UK: it has been the inspiration for the long and discreet process of the dismantling and reformation of the NHS since the 1980s.In his report to the Conservative Party’s Economic Reconstruction Group in 1977, Nicholas Ridley wrote thatdenationalisation should not be attempted by frontal attack but by preparation for return to the private sector by stealth. We should first pass legislation to destroy the public sector monopolies. We might also need to take power to sell assets. Secondly, we should fragment the industries as far as possible and set up the units as separate profit centres.After coming to power two years later, Thatcher was able openly to denationalise many industries, but the NHS, with its huge number of staff and institutions, its largely effective and equitable provision of healthcare and its great popularity, was a far more difficult proposition. In 1986 hospital cleaning services were privatised. In 1988 Oliver Letwin and John Redwood published Britain’s Biggest Enterprise: Ideas for Radical Reform of the NHS, which proposed turning the NHS into an independent trust and advocated joint ventures with the private sector and the introduction of fees.The first major legislative step was the creation of the internal market. Kenneth Clarke’s 1990 NHS and Community Care Act split the NHS into ‘service purchasers’ and ‘service providers’: hospitals and GPs would compete for custom and the successful parties would be rewarded with greater funding. The influence of the HMO model and of the Kaiser consultant Alain Enthoven was acknowledged in Parliament by the then Tory MP Quentin Davies. ‘The fund-holding practice concept owes something to the system of HMOs in the United States … Elements of the Bill reflect some of the thinking of Professor Enthoven in his famous report and reflect his concept of an internal market.’ Enthoven was seen as an expert on ‘unsustainable growth’ in health expenditure and in 1985 his report ‘Reflections on the Management of the National Health Service’ had advised the Thatcher administration that ‘in competition doctors impose on themselves controls they would never dream of accepting if the government tried to impose them.’ ‘The system needed to be reconfigured,’ he later explained, ‘in such a way as to give incentives to motivate the self-interest.’Letwin and Redwood’s ideas also had traction in Tony Blair’s 1997 National Health Service Act. Together, the 1990 and 1997 Acts turned NHS hospitals into trusts able to operate as commercial businesses. Many formed Private Finance Initiative partnerships to build and maintain hospitals – these deals, originally worth £11.4 billion, have lumbered the NHS with more than £80 billion of debt. Under New Labour a number of hospital trusts commissioned Kaiser and United Health, the largest US private health insurer, to run pilot programmes. ‘Consumer choice’ had been the mantra of the Thatcher era; under New Labour NHS patients became consumers and the goal ‘patient choice’.These changes were minor compared to those introduced by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act (Letwin was by then a senior figure in Tory policy-making), which enabled hospital trusts to raise 49 per cent of their budgets from private patients and other sources, and to use NHS ‘brand loyalty’ to attract patients to their private services. In 2017 Swindon’s Great Western NHS Hospital advertised its private service saying: ‘Our patients benefit from a premium environment while having immediate access to specialist services often only available in large NHS hospitals.’The Act gave more than 60 per cent of the NHS budget to local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), comprised of GPs and other clinicians, to be used to commission services from the private sector as well as from the NHS. Writing anonymously, one GP described the change as ‘how to get turkeys not only voting for Christmas but also plucking, basting and putting themselves in the oven’. Given their lack of business expertise, CCGs were provided with Commissioning Support Units run by private companies including KPMG, Price Waterhouse Cooper, McKinsey and Optum, the UK subsidiary of United Health. In practice, these companies now run the franchising of NHS services.A key part of the 2012 Act, to which McKinsey was a significant contributor, was the abolition of the health minister’s responsibility for national healthcare provision. This was left to NHS England under its new director, Simon Stevens, a former health policy adviser to the Blair government appointed by David Cameron because ‘he knows more about NHS problems and market solutions than any man alive.’ In his previous role as a CEO of United Health, Stevens had led corporate opposition to the introduction of Obamacare. His ‘Five-Year Forward View’, launched in 2015, became the basis for NHS England’s Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), drawn up with Optum and McKinsey. The STPs were supposed to create savings of almost £5 billion a year by 2020. As in the Kaiser model, costs are cut by reducing access to care. (Meanwhile, the revolving door continued to turn: senior government and NHS England figures who took prominent positions at Optum include Cameron’s health adviser Nick Seddon, NHS England’s commissioner David Sharp and its mental health director Martin McShane.)The STPs divided England into 44 CCG-run ‘footprint’ areas, all of which were put under pressure to amalgamate hospitals and shrink specialist units. Hospital beds have been progressively cut: the UK’s bed-to-patient ratio is now one of the lowest in any developed country. Accident and emergency departments, which not only require expensive equipment and high numbers of staff but also take the brunt of social care failings, are in the process of being cut from 144 to about fifty. GP care is increasingly provided by ‘physician associates’, nurse practitioners and pharmacists, while patients are exhorted to use privately owned, profit-making online and app consultancies such as Doctaly, GP at Hand and myGP. Opening up new markets for US tech giants is a key factor in the reconfiguration of the NHS.Enforced centralisation has resulted in ‘hub’ hospitals and fewer, larger GP practices: at least a thousand have closed since 2014 and the number with more than twenty thousand patients has tripled. With funding incentives from NHS England, GPs are merging their practices into competing, largescale organisations with names like Primary Care Networks and Super-Practices, or becoming partners in commercially driven Multi-Speciality Community Provider centres. These reduced and restructured services are open to takeovers by private companies. NHS hospitals now lease space on their own premises to private companies. Guy’s Hospital, in the absence of the funding it needed to develop adequate cancer facilities, rented space to the Hospital Corporation of America for private cancer suites that were given access to the hospital’s facilities. The merging of public and private provision in the same space usefully blurs the distinction between them. And the rationing of non-urgent operations such as hip replacements and restrictions on follow-up therapies – as well as increased waiting times – encourage patients to seek private treatment.A recent report by the Strategy Unit, an NHS consultancy, acknowledges that ICSs are designed to ‘moderate’ demand and reduce spending, while their partners keep the savings they make if they run below budget. It cautions that, as with ACOs, there is ‘only limited assurance that providers will not game the system and that quality will not suffer … large financial rewards may flow out of the NHS.’ At the 2012 World Economic Forum, Stevens (then working for United Health) led proposals to replace public healthcare systems around the world with accountable care systems. His collaborators included Medtronic, the world’s largest producer of medical devices (a US company based in Ireland for tax purposes), Qualcomm Life, which designs medical technology, and Kaiser. Since his arrival at NHS England, the influence of such companies has grown: IBM is now a lead supplier of IT; Optum runs GP referrals services and is in a partnership with the second largest GP federation, Modality. The UK’s largest GP network, the Practice Group, is owned by the American company Centene. Similar companies, such as the Priory Group, are major players in mental healthcare provision and are involved in mental health ICSs.Private companies, with their increased overheads, higher rates of borrowing and shareholder dividends, are inherently more costly to the public than state-funded services. Less obvious are the high costs of management and administration involved in franchising and marketing services. In the US these are estimated to account for more than 30 per cent of the $3.6 trillion spent on healthcare. A 2010 report commissioned by the Department of Health estimated management and administration costs at 14 per cent of total NHS spending, more than twice the figure in 1990. Commercial confidentiality laws and opaque NHS accounting make the costs of privatisation hard to quantify but privatisation is probably adding at least £9 billion a year to the NHS budget.Stevens was recently praised by politicians and the media when he called for the repeal of Section 75 of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which requires competitive market tendering for the provision of services – ostensibly a move away from privatisation. But the real reason lies in the small print. Section 75 subjects private contractors to the Competition and Markets Authority. Its repeal will deregulate the sector and make ICSs more attractive to companies. Andrew Taylor, the founding director of the Co-operation and Competition Panel for NHS Funded Services, told a Commons committee hearing in May: ‘I don’t think anyone’s realistically talking about removing the private sector from the NHS. What the proposals do in effect is deregulate NHS markets. They don’t actually remove markets from the NHS.’The Ridley Report’s proposals for denationalisation are being hurried to fulfilment. NHS property and land assets worth £10 billion are being sold to private developers. The fragmentation of a once fully integrated service into competing and commercially-driven units is well advanced and has been accomplished without proper public scrutiny, knowledge, consent or appropriate Parliamentary legislation. Successive governments have been assisted by the failure of the media to recognise the overall shape of the project and sufficiently analyse the disparate changes. The contracting of ICSs by NHS England will be concluded within 18 months

Many lawmakers made their names in health care, seeking to usher through historic changes to a broken system.John McCain was not one of them.And yet, the six-term senator from Arizona and decorated military veteran leaves behind his own health care legacy, seemingly driven less by his interest in health care policy than by his disdain for bullies trampling the “little guy.”He was not always successful. While McCain was instrumental in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, most of the health initiatives he undertook failed after running afoul of traditional Republican priorities. His prescriptions often involved more government regulation and increased taxes.In 2008, as the Republican nominee for president, he ran on a health care platform that dumbfounded many in his party, who worried that it would raise taxes on top of overhauling the U.S. tradition of workplace insurance.Many will remember McCain as the incidental savior of the Affordable Care Act. His late-night thumbs-down vote halted his party’s most promising effort to overturn a major Democratic achievement — the signature achievement, in fact, of the Democrat who beat him to become president. It was a vote that earned him regular — and biting — admonishments from President Donald Trump.McCain died Saturday, following a battle with brain cancer. He was 81. Coincidentally, his Senate colleague and good friend Ted Kennedy died on the same date, Aug. 25, nine years ago, succumbing to the same type of rare brain tumor.Whether indulging in conspiracy theories or wishful thinking, some have attributed McCain’s vote on the ACA in July 2017 to a change of heart shortly after his terminal cancer diagnosis.But McCain spent much of his 35 years in Congress fighting a never-ending supply of goliaths, among them health insurance companies, the tobacco industry and, in his estimation, the Affordable Care Act, a law that extended insurance coverage to millions of Americans but did not solve the system’s ballooning costs.His prey were the sort of boogeymen that made for compelling campaign ads in a career stacked with campaigns. But McCain was “always for the little guy,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the chief domestic policy adviser on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.“John’s idea of empathy is saying to you, ‘I’ll punch the bully for you,’ ” he said in an interview before McCain’s death.McCain’s distaste for President Barack Obama’s health care law was no secret. While he agreed that the health care system was broken, he did not think more government involvement would fix it. Like most Republicans, he campaigned in his last Senate race on a promise to repeal and replace the law with something better.After Republicans spent months bickering amongst themselves about which was better, McCain was disappointed in the option presented to senators hours before their vote: hobble the ACA and trust that a handful of lawmakers would be able to craft an alternative behind closed doors, despite failing to accomplish that very thing after years of trying.What bothered McCain more, though, was his party’s strategy to pass their so-called skinny repeal measure, skipping committee consideration and delivering it straight to the floor. They also rejected any input from the opposing party, a tactic for which he had slammed Democrats when the ACA passed in 2010 without a single GOP vote. He lamented that Republican leaders had cast aside compromise-nurturing Senate procedures in pursuit of political victory.In his 2018 memoirs, “The Restless Wave,” McCain said even Obama called to express gratitude for McCain’s vote against the Republican repeal bill.“I was thanked for my vote by Democratic friends more profusely than I should have been for helping save Obamacare,” McCain wrote. “That had not been my goal.”Better known for his work on campaign finance reform and the military, McCain did have a hand in one landmark health bill — the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, the country’s first comprehensive civil rights law that addressed the needs of those with disabilities. An early co-sponsor of the legislation, he championed the rights of the disabled, speaking of the service members and civilians he met in his travels who had become disabled during military conflict.McCain himself had limited use of his arms because of injuries inflicted while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, though he was quicker to talk about the troubles of others than his own when advocating policy.Yet two of his biggest bills on health care ended in defeat.In 1998, McCain introduced a sweeping bill that would regulate the tobacco industry and increase taxes on cigarettes, hoping to discourage teenagers from smoking and raise money for research and related health care costs. It faltered under opposition from his fellow Republicans.McCain also joined an effort with two Democratic senators, Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, to pass a patients’ bill of rights in 2001. He resisted at first, concerned in particular about the right it gave patients to sue health care companies, said Sonya Elling, who served as a health care aide in McCain’s office for about a decade. But he came around.“It was the human, the personal aspect of it, basically,” said Elling, now senior director of federal affairs at Eli Lilly. “It was providing him some of the real stories about how people were being hurt and some of the barriers that existed for people in the current system.”The legislation would have granted patients with private insurance the right to emergency and specialist care in addition to the right to seek redress for being wrongly denied care. But President George W. Bush threatened to veto the measure, claiming that it would fuel frivolous lawsuits. The bill failed.McCain’s health care efforts bolstered his reputation as a lawmaker willing to work across the aisle. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, now the Senate’s Democratic leader, sought his help on legislation in 2001 to expand access to generic drugs. In 2015, McCain led a bipartisan coalition to pass a law that would strengthen mental health and suicide prevention programs for veterans, one of several veterans’ care measures he undertook.It was McCain’s relationship with Kennedy that stood out, inspiring eerie comparisons when McCain was diagnosed last year with glioblastoma — a form of brain cancer — shortly before his vote saved the Affordable Care Act.That same aggressive brain cancer killed Kennedy in 2009, months before the passage of the law that helped realize his work to secure better access for Americans to health care.“I had strenuously opposed it, but I was very sorry that Ted had not lived to see his long crusade come to a successful end,” McCain wrote in his 2018 book.While some of his biggest health care measures failed, the experiences helped burnish McCain’s résumé for his 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.In 2007, trailing other favored Republicans, such as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in early polling and fundraising, McCain asked his advisers to craft a health care proposal, said Holtz-Eakin. It was an unusual move for a Republican presidential primary.The result was a remarkable plan that would eliminate the tax break employers get for providing health benefits to workers, known as the employer exclusion, and replace it with refundable tax credits to help people — not just those working in firms that supplied coverage — buy insurance individually. He argued that employer-provided plans were driving up costs, as well as keeping salaries lower.The plan was controversial, triggering “a total freakout” when McCain gained more prominence and scrutiny, Holtz-Eakin said. But McCain stood by it.“He might not have been a health guy, but he knew how important that was,” he said. “And he was relentless about getting it done.”

If such a claim has been made, I would highly recommend that you get that in writing and have that document notarized. That would establish a strong case for a liability case.Such or any drug prescribed for Psychiatric or Psychological disorders are incapable or curing, they only are capable in the capacity in the treatment of the disorder.Otherwise, their purpose is to act as a blocker or to provide relief to certain symptoms of given disorder. Thus they are a temporary solution to feel better until the effect of the medication wears off and you are required to take another dosage.Psychiatry is a branch of the medical field. The medical field is its own entity. It is not even an academic field. It has its own construct. It is only after one goes through premed, medical school, internship, and residency and earns their certification as a physician, which by technical standards isn’t a recognized degree other than within its own structure. The final stage is called fellowship. This is where one decides whether or not to continue to either just be a general practitioner or continue their education in order to specialize in a field of medicine or an academic science that contributes to the greater or grander vision of medicine. Which means they become Biologists, Chemists, Neurosurgeons, and other academic pursuits. The one branch that required the least path of resistance is that of Psychiatry which is ironic because of their only ability is to invent factitious disorders and name them. They even have the audacity of taking disorders that have been well established and simply changing their name or label. Such as Bipolar use to be Manic Depressive Disorder, and Multiple Personality Disorder is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder.Then when they haven’t got a clue what to diagnose someone, they came up with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a sort of catch all label where there are a multitude of symptoms as a collective. Which under scrutiny by a well trained therapist after a number of sessions will changed that diagnose to more of a single core disorder that has a more clear identity. Think about it. The first word in BPD is in fact “Borderline” and by definition in perspective is uncertain or marginally acceptable. Yet, folks who have been diagnosed with BPD get angry with me. Well that is their privilege and right since I was not the one who diagnosed them and therefore it remains their issue, and not mine. I am also aware that there are a good number of members of the Psychological fields that have bought into the Psychiatric premises and follow the dictates of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or in its current edition is commonly known as the DSM-5. Yet what most do not realize is the DSM-5 is a publication that has been created, written, edited, and published at the behest of the American Psychiatric Association.Here is the thing, there has been no world committee, organization or board of directors of international renown that handed over the statutory or any other kinds of rights of ownership of all that there is regarding Psychiatry to said American Psychiatric Association. The United Nations recognizes 195 nations in the world, and even though they “claim” to have invited others, no such claims have been substantiated. So, that’s 194 countries that didn’t give permission to the American Psychiatric Association to claim absolute authority over everyone else in the world regarding Psychiatry. What is even worse, the actual hub of Psychiatry is in Europe and more specifically in Bern Switzerland.The most respect international health system is the World Health Organization (WHO) which is an agency of the United Nations and also has its headquarters in Switzerland, but at Geneva, are highly critical of the DSM-5, although they keep rather stoic about it through their site.I am a Doctor of Psychology, and I am also a Canadian citizen who paid for and owns a copy of the DSM-5 hardcover, I use it for comic relief, a window prop to let a breeze in or hot air out, or as a door stopper.Let me put it to you this way. I could easily write up a list of fairly benign questions and bring a person in and after the oral exam and observation, I could without fail point my finger and diagnose them with a mental disorder from the infamous DSM-5.It would be outrageous of course, subjective, and speculative. Yet, the American Psychiatry Association did not deem to present this publication as a medical journal for Psychiatric personal only as it should have. No, instead they released it as a public publication which even managed to hit the bestseller list. Their excuse was to make the public more aware. Now the DSM is not a new thing, it was first published back in the 1950s, but it really didn’t get into the public eye until much, much later.Still, it did not provide the expected awareness, instead it resulted in the opposite effect, it increased the stigma regarding mental health disorder a hundred fold. Now it has become trendy to have a disorder or to be a victim of a disorder.Or simply put, an excuse for attention. Problem is, folks start believing in their strength for such needs that it either becomes an obsession or and addiction. Then of course they get angry and accusatory towards those who have spent decades in gaining the education, knowledge, understanding, comprehension and discipline in such matters. Where in my situation I become the bad guy or the antagonist, when all I am doing is telling it like it is. The blunt and honest truth.Yet, human psyche fears truth most of all. Why? Because truth ends both fantasy and possibility. So what comes out of their mouths is, “That can’t be true.” and ironically they will invent their own truth, this is what is called secular belief systems and are self inflicted more often than not. They will berate my learned education, experience, and depth of knowledge and don’t even have the courtesy to provide their own credentials of educated knowledge and expertise to debate the issue. They simply decide I am wrong and that’s the end. Kill both the messenger and the truth.It has no personal effect, I have worked years as a professional therapist among other professions within the fields of Psychology, yes, there are 14 sanctioned such fields. I studied in 10 of them and earned Doctorate degrees in all ten, as well as PhD degrees in Philosophy and Social Anthropology, and a number of lesser degrees of Masters or Bachelors in Human Biology, Human Physiology, Neurosciences, Religious Studies, History, Political Science, Global Economics, Literature and Fine Arts. I accomplished this over a period of 20 plus years in 4 different universities in 4 different countries.Why bother? Because not only is diversity important, but all of these things allowed me to have far greater insight on human reasoning, which is the bulk of the human psyche of human behavior within the human condition.Further, I am still a dedicated scientist and I am not some sellout who has gotten published where I will fall into the echelons of authorship. I am a team player and the research I do is mostly by contract which means all discovery, findings, results, and documentation are property of that who contracted me to do the work, whether it be a university, a private institute, or government. I sell them my publishing and copyright. They pay for it, they can have it. I do not need the fame, popularity, material wealth, and all the trappings that go with such.It is not wrong to be unique.