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It’s time to call out Integrated Care
The Tories’ so-called Integrated Care plan is the Trojan horse for the Americanisation of the NHS — it even used to have the same name as the US system. So why is almost nobody talking about it, asks CLAUDIA WEBBE MP

IN the already inadequate parliamentary debate about the perilous state of our NHS, the discussion will rightly touch on the numbers of nurses, on the closure of wards and hospitals, ambulance waits, patients on trolleys in Accident and Emergency, waiting lists, cancer care and cancelled operations.

It will also sometimes – not often enough – include the intolerable burdens Tory cuts and policies are placing on NHS staff and the resulting risks to patients.

But it will never, or almost never, involve discussion of the government’s Integrated Care plan, even though it underpins and cements the harm done to the NHS by decades of neoliberal policies – and will lead to more and more patients not receiving the care they should.

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