Lawsuits in total cost the Health Service more than £1.5 billion a year. Any visitor to NHS hospitals knows that these cynical firms are allowed to advertise their ‘services’ in the public areas of hospitals themselves. In effect, the NHS has to help people to ruin it. There is no need for any of this. It all stems from a crazy mistake made back in the 1990s by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Almost everyone who understood the subject was against introducing no win, no fee lawsuits at the time, including senior judges and distinguished lawyers. They warned that it would ‘Americanise’ our legal system. And they were dead right. I can remember, as long ago as 1982, watching Paul Newman playing a deadbeat US lawyer in The Verdict (pictured). ...read
PETER HITCHENS: Save Britain from bloodsucking lawyers who squeeze £440m out of the NHS every year
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