Tory MP and GP Phillip Lee made a striking call this morning for patients suffering from lifestyle-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes to pay for their prescriptions as part of a larger shake-up of the NHS. He was speaking as part of a series of presentations from members of the Free Enterprise Group ahead of next week’s Autumn Statement on their proposals for spending cuts which would allow George Osborne to meet his target of having debt as a proportion of GDP falling by 2015/16.
Lee said that to ensure that people could continue to access care when they needed it, the NHS needed a fundamental reform. He told the audience at the Institute of Economic Affairs that the government and the public needed to recognise that the way the NHS had been set up for a generation of ‘stoic’ British people was now no longer viable and take steps to reform it accordingly, otherwise the health system faced what he alarmingly described as ‘collapse’.
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