How the Health and Social Care Bill 2011 would end entitlement to comprehensive health care in England

Patients’ experiences of their healthcare in relation to their expectations and satisfaction: a population survey

“…15 It will be essential for those who are delivering care in the midst of organizational and, frequently, personal turbulence, to remain focused on what matters most for patients, which means most of all effective communication, adequate information and good outcomes.…”

The financial crisis and health care systems in Europe: universal care under threat? Trends in health sector reforms in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain

“…The CCGs should guarantee health care delivery but are not responsible for the population's health in a given geographic area, except for urgent and emergency care. According to Pollock & Price 55 , government's duty to provide comprehensive care has been abolished, since according to the new law, government only has the duty to promote comprehensive care, not to guarantee it. Germany, with a production model based on high-tech development, a highly skilled workforce, and high productivity, was benefited by the introduction of the Euro 2 , which facilitated exportation within the region.…”

Civil society and the Health and Social Care Act in England and Wales: Theory and praxis for the twenty-first century

“…This is interesting in a wider sociological context in the sense that tampering with the NHS was widely perceived, to be politically ill-advised to say the very least. That the coalition government managed to enact such a radical reform programme, (Pollock et al, 2011), in the face of a sustained public campaign against those reforms, with apparently little or no negative effect merits further exploration. In effect, this framing allows us to address a question of how this reform was enacted in face of such pronounced opposition, and to posit a partial explanation drawing upon an observed decline in the possibilities for communicative action across all sectors of civil society.…”

“…We follow this up with a 'refinement' (taking account of a range of criticisms) of Habermas' account of the lifeworld and civil society, which involved a split of the latter into enabling and protest sectors. In the third section we offer a brief characterization of post-1970s financial capitalism, which prepares the ground, in the next section, for an extended case study of the background to and genesis of the Health and Social Care Bill and its transmutation into the Health and Social Care Act of 2013, which effectively (in all but name) privatized the National Health Service in England (see Pollock et al, 2011;Reynolds and McKee, 2012;Davis and Tallis, 2013). In the concluding paragraphs we return to the theoretical domain to address the dialectical relation between theory and research: how might our broadly Habermasian framework help us to understand the contested passage of the Health and Social Care Act and the re-commodification of the NHS in England, and how might our detailed case study inform and suggest theoretical revisions?…”

“…4. Although a small band of people from all walks of life, including medicine and academia, were recruited or coopted to the government cause, there is no doubt that 'best evidence' on comparative health care testified to the regressive nature of the Health and Social Care Bill: this was policy based evidence, not evidence based policy (see Pollock et al, 2011;Reynolds and McKee, 2012). 5.…”