All Michael White articles – Page 8
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CommentMichael White: reform concessions do little to soften Tory image
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Nick Clegg hired Wembley Stadium to celebrate his party’s triumph in helping rewrite Andrew Lansley’s Health Bill and “saving the NHS.” But Lib Dem boasting caused resentment among Conservative MPs of all stripes.
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CommentMichael White: Southern Cross is a victim of financial engineering
Things may finally be changing but, until the GMB union and Ed Miliband got stuck in this week, I have been repeatedly astonished by the failure to link the care homes crisis to the fate of Andrew Lansley’s bill.
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CommentMichael White: how to survive in the blame game
I heard a senior NHS manager on the radio mid-week sounding like Sharon (“I don’t do blame”) Shoesmith, Haringey’s ousted children’s services chief, as he defended his hospital against a damning report from the Care Quality Commission.
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CommentMichael White: bill opposition proving more than just yellow-bellied
Perhaps I underestimated Liberal Democrat determination to amend the bill (only one bill in this column) or push it under a bus.
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CommentMichael White: who's the one to watch?
I must admit that the first thing I looked for in Monday’s newspapers wasn’t Cameron’s big NHS speech. It was to see whether weekend reports of boastful remarks about “big opportunities” for the US private sector in Britain’s healthcare market had gained much media traction.
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CommentMichael White: mixed-market debate feels like déjà vu all over again
“John Redwood is right” is not a sentence I try to utter very often. The Tory right winger is brainy and high minded, but he places too much faith in markets and lacks political sense.
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CommentMichael White: despite distractions, the focus remains trained on reforms
Did you catch that row over the NHS at prime minister’s question time? No, I thought not. What with the royal nuptial and the killing of Osama bin Laden we have all had a lot on our media plate.
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CommentMichael White: the Tory rhetoric is now bogged down in detail
Over a junk food lunch with NHS heavies recently I found the conversation turning – yet again – to Andrew Lansley. Is he on the level? Does he have a hidden agenda to privatise the system? That kind of thing.
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CommentMichael White: time to address costly preventable failures
It being Easter weekend this column thought to give Andrew Lansley and his NHS reforms the week off. The secretary of state is on his own painful road to Calvary, carrying a legislative cross of his own making.
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CommentMichael White: Lansley must tune in to rescue reforms
To listen to Nick Clegg picking his way through the minefield of NHS reform on Radio 4 was to be reminded how hard it is to calibrate effective opposition – words and actions which can make a difference to important legislation.
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CommentMichael White: with friends like Lansley's, who needs an opposition?
More and more people have started to ask me: “Is David Cameron going to sack Andrew Lansley?”
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CommentMichael White: 'Nicholson's challenge' matters more than Osborne's Budget
At the TUC’s big anti-cuts rally in Hyde Park a young NHS physiotherapist spoke with a passion and sincerity which characterised the day’s main event, if not the hooligan fringe rioting in nearby Piccadilly.
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CommentMichael White: under fire Tories retreating forwards
In my inbox on Monday I found an email from some self-styled “Big Society NHS” doctors reporting what they heard Andrew Lansley saying at a dinner given for the health secretary in his childhood neighbourhood of Hornchurch, Essex.
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CommentMichael White: Lansley battles to keep reforms afloat
Colonel Gaddafi may have benefited from the rival distraction of Japan’s apocalyptic tsunami, but Andrew Lansley has no such luck. As HSJ’s editorial asks if he is “screaming inside”, wave after political wave rolls over him.
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CommentMichael White: disquiet over accountability grows in the health war
The most startling political utterance I heard during another lively week in the health war fell not from the lips of Andrew Lansley, nor even from militant (“Back to the 1930s”) medics, but from mild mannered Stephen Dorrell.
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CommentMichael White: Lansley's cloudy vision blurs the clear NHS reality
Watching the drama of health reform debate week after week, I sometimes think of a clever young Tory think tanker called Danny Kruger. Remember him?In 2005 Danny was forced to stand down as his party’s candidate to fight Tony Blair in Sedgefield because he had been heard promising “a period ...
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Comment
Michael White: 'Price competition has never been the policy... Yeah, right.'
To be frank with you, I’d never heard of David Bennett before he was unexpectedly promoted to become the new chair of Monitor, as it evolves into the economic regulator to the entire NHS. Truly this is a real-life version of Eric Carle’s children’s story The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Guess ...
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CommentMichael White: away from NHS reforms, healthcare problems - and solutions - still sound familiar
Let’s try even harder to cheer ourselves up this week by averting our gaze from NHS reforms and looking at a near neighbour with more pressing healthcare dilemmas. Not to mention deeper budget gloom. No prizes for guessing I was in Dublin recently.
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NewsLansley: Competition will protect commissioners from 'abusive relationships'
Andrew Lansley has defended the competition agenda set out in the Health Bill during the committee stage its passage through Parliament.
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CommentMichael White: somwhere to escape the cuts
Wherever you turn at present it’s hard to escape the government’s cuts programme. I confirmed that (again) when I rang my sister at the nursery-infant-and-parenting unit she has worked in for many years. Their budget has been slashed, redundancies loom. Should she volunteer to go, taking decades of experience with ...