40,000 names on the petition, which is 25% of the electorate. ...
And Enought to elect a save the Hospital Independant councilor at the local elections, Nothing wakes up lazy Councilors like the prospect of loosin 14K a year in expenses for doing sod all.
Get on with it... make them listen
Positive action now

it was a good do. arround a thausand turned up.

The NHS has a very large proportion of the healthcare market in the UK. If it were a private company the government would have used monopoly legislation to curb its activities. Monopolies are bad for customers, but if the government is running the monopoly it seems to be immune from break up. Scrap the NHS. It wastes our money. As a recent report said, see

 http://www.healthcarecommission.co.uk/NewsAndEvents/PressReleases/PressReleaseDetail/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=4018541&chk=KvG1sX

it seems to be run more for the benefit of its employees than its customers. NHS employees have no real incentive to provide a good service as they know the vast majoroty of customers cannot take their 'business' elsewhere.

In business, private monopolies are bad for customers because they are there for one purpose only: to fleece customers for as much money as possible.

The whole point about the NHS is that it is NOT run as a 'business'. Private health firms will ONLY supply a service if they can make a profit out of it. The NHS treats everyone, not just those that can afford the insurance premiums or private funding to "take their business elsewhere". Even in the great 'free market' USA, those who can't afford to pay the privateers rely on state funded health care.

How many private firms would run a health service that makes no money, and spends £87bn a year?

What motivates nurses, doctors and the rest of the frontline NHS staff is not the grubby greed of private business, nor is it their own self interest. They are motivated by something that Tories and businessmen know nothing about: the desire to help those in need, and a sense of what it means to provide a public service.

Of course, they should also be paid a decent wage, have good terms and conditions, and be able to look forward to retirement on a decent pension at the decent age of 60 as well.

Nationalise the pharmaceutical companies and the private health sector. Then tax the rich to fund a first class NHS for all.

The NHS isn't a business, you couldn't be more right there. That's why it is such poor value for money and so wasteful. As for nationalising drugs companies, all that would mean is that drugs would take ten times as long to develop, would cost much more and most probably wouldn't work. We used to have a nationalised car company in this country, and it went broke because it made crap cars that nobody wanted. They bought better cars from private firms. NHS staff are free to provide a poor service because they have a virtual monopoly. Nationalisation causes poverty and poor service. Just look at Russia, a deadbeat country with terrible living standards and poor life expectancy. Why? They nationalised everything for 74 years.

Perhaps you'd care to explain why since it became free-market-capitalist (rather than state-capitalist as it was before) Russia's life expectancy has fallen considerably? I don't want to defend state-capitalist Russia, but at least it could care for it's citizens better than present day Russia under it's later leaders (Yes, Stalin's era was far worse than the current era simply because of the amount of people the brutal dictator killed).