By Tony O’Sullivan, Retired Paediatrician and Co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public
The government is playing dangerous games with our NHS as it pushes its reorganisation of the NHS through parliament.
The Health and Care Bill committee stage ended 2 November. The Bill is not really about a new threat to the NHS but it is nailing down a more sophisticated structure for bringing private interests even more into the NHS. After years of denying privatisation in the NHS, despite the masses of evidence to the contrary, the government is now brazenly welcoming partnership within the private sector and challenging us to object.
A parasite living off the NHS
And that partnership is like a parasite living off the NHS - living off its funding; living off its NHS trained staff; living off – living in – NHS premises; and using the NHS logo of course. But it is also careful not to kill off the NHS, not to kill off what it is living off.
With the NHS in crisis from neglect and NHS staff totally exhausted from Covid, where does the money go from this government? On Covid and public health, we all know £37 billion pounds have been wasted on the Test and Trace service and more billions on PPE contracts.
£10billion to private hospitals
On waiting lists, of 5.9 million people now, already about four million before Covid, they’ve given £10billion over the next four years to private hospitals, to use for elective NHS patients, rather than investing in the NHS to build back its capacity. Now for the first time more hip and knee replacements are done in the private sector, in private hospitals, then in the NHS. Almost half are people who are able to choose to pay to jump the queue and pay for their treatment that they should have had on the NHS; and the other half are NHS waiting list patients.
There is a huge shortage of CT and MRI scanners, a disgrace for this the 6th richest economy in the world. And Sajid Javid, our Health and Care Secretary of State, announced recently £6 billion pounds to open 100 new diagnostic centres. But they won’t be run by the NHS – maybe a handful – but they’ve already agreed contracts with a long list of private companies to run these diagnostic centres. And I know from bitter experience in South East London, SYNLAB, a private company, was given a two and a quarter billion pounds pathology contact over the next 15 years. So, for 15 years now South East London’s pathology will be run by a private company.
The wrong bill at the wrong time
The government has used Covid to justify its friends and parasites feeding off the NHS,
which it keeps in a deliberately weakened state, but doesn’t kill it off. This bill, as the BMA has said, is ‘the wrong bill at the wrong time’, and it does not stop private interests. It deregulates the awarding of most contracts. It assumes private interests will be there, it allows them to be in partnership on integrated care boards and committees. It threatens to deregulate clinical staff too and to deskill professions.
Now at this time of unprecedented crisis in the NHS and the very real threat to the function of the NHS and the population it serves, we say scrap the Health and Care Bill! And please let us all come together now to save the NHS and to care for the services we all need.
Please let us know what you think about the bill in the comments below.