Hospital records of all NHS patients sold to insurers

Remember this when the Government tells you how great Care.Data is going to be.

Reminds me of the 'snoopers' charter' red herring - GCHQ already had the capability to mass collect data. There were plenty of scare tactics there too, the spectre of terrorism and paedos has simply been replaced with cancer here.

Anyone who tells you individual data can be 'anonymised' in the internet age is lying to you. The trick is to figure out why.

the why is easy. cant afford it ... die.

On pie pad so can't easily link to it but I read that there's a plan underfoot to merge NI and income tax. The suspicion is that it is designed to separate the idea that you pay NI for the NHS and hence separate the idea of funding the NHS through tax. Then the private companies will step in and basically you either can't afford healthcare or you pay via insurance. The data allows insurance companies to assess premiums. Remember that these are private companies in which the likes of Hunt will have a cushy job.

Luckily, you can safely ignore those views; they are both economically and politically illiterate.

There is an assumption abroad that things like public health services are inefficient and so we only fund them out of decency. This is widely assumed by lefties who wish to assume that righties want to abolish the the whole concept out of indecency.

But any righty with a basic understanding of economics 101 knows that insurance works better if everybody buys it (due to a concept called Adverse Selection), and thus switching away from single payer insurance wouldn't lower costs, it would raise them. Adverse selection is one of the great inefficiencies of the American health care system that even the most rabid Tory would not wish to recreate.

So you see, while it makes sense for both right and left to wish to change how the NHS delivers the actual services such as hospitals and clinics and drugs and what have you. Neither side has any motive to change how it is funded in any significant way.

Politically, if the Tories were to privatise health insurance, that would be their last act. The party would immediately dissolve because the elderly people who have voted for them would be the ones whose insurance premiums would be highest for obvious reasons. So as a policy, it only makes any form of sense if that policy is the entire purpose of the party. It would make sense for UKIP to destroy itself through victory over Europe, but not for the Tories to dismantle themselves through a suicidally stupid health policy that their successors would immediately reverse anyway.

In short. The Tories dismantling the NHS isn't a Tory wet dream, it is a Labour fantasy.

Firm linked to drug makers sought pact on access to patient records database

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014 ... s-database

I fully expect more stories like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if knowledge of them was what saw the unexpected 'delay'.

It is also because the government are ideologically opposed to actually having big government. Though lining their own pockets at the tax payers expense is so much easier than getting a real job.

The worst part is most of them are already so rich that they don't even actually need the money.

Thankfully I've had no trips to the hospital during that time. My wife however, has had lots of visits in that time. It'll make her blood boil when she finds out compannies could have has access to deeply personal medical information.

She will not be the only one. The fact that your medical premiums will rise will only really affect those who have private health insurance or if their employers pay it as part of a benefits package.