CAMPAIGNERS from Stroud are calling on the community to stand up and fight for the values and future of the National Health Service.

Stroud Against the Cuts (SATC) is asking residents to write to MP Neil Carmichael to ask him to support the NHS Reinstatement Bill.

It has teamed up with Labour, the Greens, 38 Degrees and Momentum in Stroud to campaign on the streets ahead of the second reading in the House of Commons on November 4.

The Bill proposes to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service by reversing 25 years of piecemeal marketisation.

If passed, supporters say it would roll back the health service’s “internal market”, end contracting, and return the NHS to purely public provision.

This would effectively reverse the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Christine Stockwell form SATC said if action wasn’t taken now then the NHS will only see continued “fragmentation” over the coming years.

“The choice is: a free comprehensive and accountable public service - or an American style insurance based service,” she said.

“The 2012 Act required NHS contracts to go to competitive tender in the free market - making the profit motive central.

“It allows private companies to cherry pick the easy treatments leaving the NHS to treat complex, emergency and costly conditions that the private sector will not. This destabilises and fragments the NHS.

“The Reinstatement Bill makes the case for a planned, managed health service, paid for by taxation: free, accountable, equitable, affordable, safe and which values its staff.

“Evidence shows that with healthcare, the market is not the most cost effective or fairest way. “The Bill seeks to integrate health and social care, remove the NHS from competition law, improve public health, stop privatisation and return to its founding principles.”

She called on members of the public in Stroud to write a letter to Mr Carmichael asking him to support the bill.

Signed copies of the letter will be delivered to the Tory MP ahead of the debate next week.

A suggested letter is available at www.stroudagainstcuts.co.uk or in the town centre on Saturday.

The group will be leafletting on King Street by the entrance to Merrywalks on Saturday October 29 and others will be near the Shambles from 11am.

In July 2016 the NHS Reinstatement Bill was successfully presented in the House of Commons, by Margaret Greenwood, Labour MP for Wirral West.

The second reading is scheduled for November 4 2016.

The private members bill would reinstate the secretary of state’s responsibility for the health of UK citizens, something the Health and Social Care Act removed.

It would also abolish bodies such as NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts and clinical commissioning groups, allowing commercial companies to provide services only if they were essential to patient welfare and the NHS could not do so itself.