'NHS' is Now Just a Logo
by Dr Bob Gill
The NHS has already been privatised in law.
The Health and Care act 2022 completed the legislative transition from a publicly provided service to a tax funded, privately controlled and run service resembling American 'managed care'.
The NHS has been reduced to a logo and a funding stream from which profit can be extracted through staff wage suppression, down-skilling and task shifting clinical work (employing the cheapest least qualified staff to provide care outside of their competence).
Most dangerously, profits are to be made through the denial of care to the sick.
Managed care allows money not spent on patients to be kept by private corporations as profit, thus creating a perverse incentive to let the sick suffer or die. This has been the well documented experience in America.
The NHS now resembles Medicare and Medicaid, both public funded but privately delivered healthcare for most of those excluded by the US private insurance industry.
The Labour party and the health unions have colluded with this process.
From 1997 to 2010 Blair/Brown governments saddled the NHS with toxic PFI debt and began outsourcing medical services. In 2006 the health unions were co-opted by signing up to the Social Partnership Forum (SPF) agreeing not to oppose privatisation. [Health unions signed an updated SPF agreement in 2019 to support the Conservative rollout of a 10 year NHS privatisation plan].
Streeting and Starmer, both in reciept of funding from wealthy donors with financial interest in private health, have loudly signalled their intention to keep lining the pockets of private healthcare with a commitment to public-private partnerships, while remaining silent on the catastrophic impact, happening now, of shrinking capacity, dismantling public health and driving staff out of the NHS.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has committed to almost all the Tories’ policies on NHS privatisation and general austerity. His health spokesman, Wes Streeting, took £15,000 from a hedge fund manager connected to vulture healthcare privatising. source here click link
The intentional collapse of NHS service provision - in particular emergency care, rising waiting lists and struggling GP surgeries is contributing to record excess deaths and preventable harm.
This avoidable inhumanity is the catalyst for a public shift into paying out of pocket for private treatment or for top-up private insurance in an attempt to insulate themselves from future risk of sickness.
We need to call for renationalisation. Health unions must abandon their current complicit stance and embark on industrial action in good faith. Memberships of all unions should demand that their leaders fund mass public awareness campaigns and co-ordinate strikes. Only grassroots awareness and action stands any chance of there being a renationalisation.
If not reversed, healthcare in England will exclude many, worsen health outcomes further, cost more than double, exploit psychologically damaged staff and continue to waste £Billions in bureaucracy, dysfunction, fraud, enriching shareholders and CEOs.
Dr. Bob Gill
