NHS tax on visitors, staff and the disabled is sick - EXPRESS COMMENT
IT IS frequently spoken of as some kind of sacred cow but managers at the NHS have been behaving in the kind of rapacious manner that would do a cut-throat business proud.
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Last year it made an unbelievable £174million from car parking charges, a figure that would be scandalous enough if it affected patients and visitors but which even includes its own staff.
Nor do they stop there – they also charge the disabled.
Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS, must be spinning in his grave.
Hospitals, by their very definition, are places where people are at their most desperate and vulnerable, and they need to be treated with special care.
This extends to the circumstances surrounding their visit.
It is enough to worry about a potentially debilitating illness, without having concerns about how to pay for the visit added to the mix.
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Many people have to come from afar for their appointments.
If they are kept in, family and friends might need to travel for miles to see them.
If they are kept in for long periods, that is going to ramp up their parking costs.
The NHS is not a business. It does not exist to make money (although it’s certainly never slow to ask for it).
For once the Lib Dems have found the right term to describe this: a “tax on sickness”. That is exactly what it is. For shame, NHS.
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Remainer admits error
PA
Another day, another Brexit naysayer who grudgingly admits that our exit from the EU will not have a “damaging impact” at all.
This time round it is Lord Macpherson, the former Treasury chief and one of the leading architects of Project Fear.
He had previously suggested that Brexit would cost British households thousands – which he now concedes not to be the case.
The Daily Express, of course, has been saying this all along.
We have pointed out the huge opportunities opening up to Britain and the prosperous future that awaits us outside the EU.
Now all the people who had been saying the opposite are being forced to concede that we were right all along, although they don’t like to admit it.
There is, as they say, more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth…
Nice to see Lord Macpherson join the fold.
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Cheers for Prince Harry
Prince Harry sounded full of beans in his stint as guest editor of Radio 4’s Today programme.
Being engaged clearly suits him.
Now Meghan is joining the family she never had, he added.
That is quite a family to marry in to.
We wish them both all happiness in the years to come.
