According to the Independent, on page 7 Ed Miliband wants to hand adult social care to the NHS. It says:

“The NHS would be handed responsibility for providing nursing home care for the elderly under a future Labour government in an attempt to constrain Britain’s spiralling healthcare costs, Ed Miliband will announce today. Under proposals to be set out by the Labour leader, councils would lose their historic role in providing social care for the local population. Instead, responsibility for “cradle to grave” health and social care would pass to the NHS in an attempt to make billions of pounds in efficiency savings.”

On one thing he is right. One organisation should look after all the budgets in this area. But, why pick the NHS which is the largest, most inefficient of all of them.

He talks about the NHS as if it were one entity which is far from the truth. Hospitals are paid depending on through put of patients with no incentives to keep patients out of hospital. GPs are independent small businesses.

When the elderly need some social care help they are not patients. Often a little help getting dressed in the morning, ensuring food is available and some guidance on how to keep fit is all they require. Do we really want to start categorising our mums and dads as patients just because they are getting old and a little frail?

The NHS has a culture of everyone being a patient and everyone being counted as a “bed”. The reality is that people are people not patients and if the do fall ill need to move from the patient category to the people category as quickly as possible.

Ed Miliband wants everyone to become and remain an NHS patient for life. Centralist, socialist nonsense.