The Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has suggested that if he was Prime Minister he would phase out private healthcare.
In an interview with the BBC’s Political Thinking Podcast he said he would implement a ten year plan for the NHS.
Sir Keir described how his mum who was a nurse feared the NHS would move towards privatisation should things get “really bad.”
Sir Keir’s mother passed away in 2015 after suffering a long fight with Still’s disease and she described the NHS as her “lifeline.”
Sir Keir told host Nick Robinson that as she lay dying in intensive care his mother urged him “you won’t let your dad go private will you?”
The NHS has a backlog of almost 6m people on a waiting list for a host of things which could take years to clear.
Sir Keir was asked what he would do to cut waiting lists if he were Prime Minister, he said, “I would listen to my mum in this, and that’s why we need a better plan for the NHS which is about money.
“But it’s also about a lot more than money, it’s about using technology in a different way.
“Of course, we have had the private sector providing operations that people have now had at no cost to them, and you’ve got to have a practical answer to this.
“But that sense of public service of the NHS ran very very deep in my mum and runs very very deep in me.”
Sir Keir was pressed if he would ban private medicine, the Labour leader said, “I don’t think you can just stop it in one go like that, but you do need more resources, you actually – we actually need to rethink health.
“We’d be a better country if we dealt with health upstream, preventative measures in the community, much better use of technology in our hospitals and a proper ten-year plan for the NHS with appropriate funding.
“That would be a much better discussion about the NHS than the extent to how much needs to be private or not.
“This is almost like the discussion about private schools. I want the NHS and I want our school system to be so good that nobody feels that they need to go private in the first place.”
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