Health & Care

The NHS is a great example of a universal WellFair service: it provides basic, preventative and remedial health services to everyone without charge, so you can make the most of your life.

Integrated Health & Care

The Health & Care WellFair services will be expanded to include medical, childcare and care for the aged; integrating health and caring into a coordinated service.

The Health & Care WellFair budget includes the following items in addition to the NHS (£130Bn): Family and children, Social exclusion, R&D Social protection, Social protection, Sickness & disability and Survivors pensions. The total budget comes to £273Bn, or £373 per person per month.

Focus on the basics

It is essential that we deliver the basic care services well, before we entertain the ability to deliver more specialised services. This means focussing on child health, preventative care and public health. There is an almost unlimited demand for care and there is always a limit on services delivered as a social provision paid for by taxes, so where choices have to be made we must favour the broadest benefit.

Increasingly we have to focus on managing chronic illness, and that means moving funds to local governments and giving local governments the space to plan for the long term care of their community. LIFE’s empowerment of local communities, and push to give those local Community Assemblies responsibility for 50% of the Health & Care budget, provides the sound foundation for our common health into the future.

Not another reorganisation!
The NHS is tired of being re-organised, and we understand the concern of health practitioners and the resources that get wasted with each new re-organisation effort.

It is LIFE policy to push more spending and responsibility down to Community governments, and we expect that doctors who do not wish to remain as commissioning agents will be able to pass their commissioning responsibilities to Community Health & Care management and administration officers.
It is not in the interests of the service that there be a requirement to competitively bid out services, we will repeal Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Community care

LIFE will move 50% of the Health & Care budget to the Community level, so we can care better and more effectively by driving service provision based on local and regional needs. This means ensuring that every Community has an Urgent Care Centre that can provide 24×7 coverage for when doctors’ surgeries are closed, and alleviate the demand on A&E departments in hospitals.

Local NHS control is the solution to the current budgetary, quality and organisational problems of the health service. Communities will have primary responsibility for delivery of all health and caring services, collaborating in their Region, or nationally, for more specialised hospital services.

Disability

LIFE includes the current sickness & disability benefits budget (£36Bn) in the WellFair Health & Care budget. The expectation is that this money will be spent by Communities to provide services and support to their disabled citizens, and it will be at the discretion of Community Assemblies as to whether a portion of this is made available to disabled persons for use as disposable income in the event that the disability results in an inability to engage in gainful contribution. The disbursement of WellFair funds as disposable income to disabled persons is the only exception to the general rule that WellFair budgets must be used exclusively to deliver services, not cash benefits.

We believe that the current government’s revision of the disability testing system has been a shameful abuse of civic responsibility, and we believe it can greatly improved when delivered locally as part of an integrated and long-term care system. Furthermore many disabled people will benefit from the emancipation of labour markets, and will find it much easier to get and keep rewarding opportunities for gainful contribution in the unleashed micro-economy that WellFair engenders.

Fees or charges will never be allowed as a condition for receipt of WellFair services.

No junk food

LIFE supports the BMA proposal for a ban on the sale and distribution of commercial junk food on, in or through any and all social services, including NHS hospitals and other facilities,