Simon Stevens, head of NHS England and ex president of U.S. private health insurance firm United Health, has just hired the chief executive of a leading American healthcare organisation to help Americanise the NHS.
Tim Ferris MD – chief executive of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organisation and formerly the senior vice president of Population Health Management at Partners Healthcare in Boston, USA. Ferris was said to be running an Accountable Care Organisation (ACO). NHS England want the same ACO setup here in the English NHS but renamed them Integrated care Systems. So they've hired Dr Ferris to help roll out American style health plans called ACOs.
Also on board and newly appointed is Lord Ari Darzi of new Labour Tony Blair fame. In the 2000's, under Blair's 'centralisation' plans, Darzi recommended closure of over 132 A&Es in England.
Lordy Lordy! Who's working for the Tories?
Also steering the private ship is Lord Patrick Carter. The Labour peer undertook a review in 2016 for previous Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Lord Carter of coles looked at healthcare systems abroad, including the United States, to see how savings (cuts) made in the U.S. private healthcare sector could be introduced into the English NHS. His review is currently cutting whole swathes of pathology labs across England, readying to replace them with private sector equivalents some say.
Welcoming them all on board the NHS England private parties only gravy train is no other than Dido Harding, so expect the train crash soon!
As mentioned previously in an article from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP)...
The Americanisation of the NHS is not something waiting for us in a post-Brexit future. It is already in full swing. Since 2017 Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) have been taking over the purchasing as well as the provision of NHS services in England, deciding who gets which services, which are free and which – as with the dentist and prescriptions – we have to pay for.
Known in the US as Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs), ICSs are partnerships between hospitals, clinicians and private sector providers designed – and incentivised – to limit and reduce public healthcare costs, and in particular to lessen the demand on hospitals.
Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs), the forerunners of ACOs, were pioneered by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser was a model for his planned NHS reforms.
When a trial of ACOs was announced in the UK in 2017, it caused an outcry from campaigners and NHS England quickly rebranded them ICSs. But the Kaiser model isn’t new to healthcare policy in the UK: it has been the inspiration for the long and discreet process of the dismantling and reformation of the NHS since the 1980s. source Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP)
