THE voice of the NHS managers spoke up yesterday. The NHS Confederation reported ‘The health service in England won’t survive unchanged’.
This is doublespeak, for the health service won’t survive. It is to be privatised using the economic crisis as a reason to push privatisation through.
The NHS managers explain that in a period of economic catastrophe it is impossible to have an NHS – with all health care provided at the point of need without reference to cost, or the ability to pay.
Managers at its conference were told that they face an ‘extremely challenging’ financial outlook.
The report, published yesterday, warns that the NHS in England faces a real-terms reduction of between £8bn and 10bn over the three years after 2011.
The report does not state that the vast government indebtedness which arose out of the hundreds of billions of pounds given to the banks and the bankers to stave off their bankruptcy, at the expense of state bankruptcy, means that the NHS and the Welfare State has to be hacked to pieces and its remnants privatised to make good this enormous indebtedness, after a large number of District General Hospitals have been closed.
The report considers that a reduction of between £8bn and £10bn in the health budget in the three years after 2011 will mean not just NHS cuts and hospital closures but also a cap on the budget for new drugs and for important new treatments.
This opens the way to the era of top-up payments, when the rich will get the drugs that they can pay for while the rest die.
This logic means special wards in hospitals for top-up patients and ordinary patients on trolleys.
The head of policy at the NHS Confederation, Nigel Edwards, said: ‘Having had seven years of plenty it now looks like seven years of famine from 2011 onwards.
‘We are really going to have to think very deeply and carefully about everything we do and subject it to very rigorous scrutiny – and enlist all of our doctors, our front-line clinical staff in rethinking the way we do things.
‘This is a situation affecting health systems all across Europe as governments experience a mismatch of income tax and expenditure budgets.’
For the record, the confederation warns against previous strategies such as ‘slash and burn’, indiscriminate savings, letting waiting lists grow or allowing health service pay to fall out of line with the rest of the economy.
It however knows well that all of these features of the developing privatisation of the NHS will become even uglier, and the contradiction between private top-up health care for the rich and complete neglect for the poor will become unbearable.
The managers are turned 100 per cent to the privateers saying that the crisis opens the way to limiting NHS care to a basic package that might exclude care such as IVF, homeopathy and elements of dentistry – except for top-up payers or the insured.
Health Secretary Andy Burnham has admitted that the health service will face a ‘challenge’ over the next five to 10 years.
There is however a clear way forward, which even the BMA has begun to recognise. This is to drive the market out of the NHS, and get rid of the privateers using the huge amounts of money that ends up in their coffers for patient care.
The PFI must be ended. It has proven to be the way that finance groups make hundreds of billions of profits, out of building hospitals and leasing them to the NHS.
There is only one way to slash the price of drugs and that is to nationalise the drugs industry, and put it under workers control, and to do the same for the banks.
The NHS must be defended. All District General Hospitals threatened with closure must be occupied and kept open, and the Labour government must be brought down by a general strike and replaced by a workers government.
