Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) Hospital Consultants Committee, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, has spelt out clearly what the government’s parliamentary bill to force competition between hospitals and bring in the policy of the NHS being thrown open to ‘any willing provider’ would mean for hospitals – a return to the conditions of the 1930s.
He said the coalition’s plans to force hospitals to compete with profit-driven, private ‘willing providers’ would lead to hospital closures and private health companies ‘cherry picking’ patients, denying health care to those with long-term costly conditions.
These patients are naturally unattractive to private companies out to maximise their profits, and they would be denied the care they required, and consigned to what he describes as an NHS reduced to a ‘tattered safety net’.
Dr Porter’s conclusion that ‘very deliberately the government wishes to turn back the clock to the 1930s and 1940s when there were private, charitable and co-operative providers’ is absolutely correct.
There is nothing misguided or ill thought out about this bill.
The Health and Social Care Bill is nothing less than a conscious attempt by the coalition government to smash the NHS and drive the working class back to the conditions of the 1930s.
These were the days of private health care where there was no universal health service for workers and their families, and only the wealthy could benefit from a first rate service.
It was precisely this that the working class fought against when, after the Second World War, they refused to accept a return to the conditions of the 30s.
The NHS and the entire Welfare State was not gifted to the working class by a benevolent capitalist system, it was wrenched from them in the teeth of furious opposition from the private companies – and indeed from the majority of the medical profession at the time, who made their living out of private medicine.
The establishment of the NHS in 1948 was a concession made by British capitalism to an angry and organised working class that, having gone through a world war, was not prepared to return to a life of poverty where it had to rely on charity for medical treatment.
Capitalism at this time was able to make these concessions, but this has changed dramatically.
Today, the world crisis of the capitalist system means that all these concessions are no longer affordable.
The NHS budget, as far as the capitalist class is concerned, is a terrible drain at a time when everything is geared to propping up the banks and ensuring profitability for private corporations.
The demand of the capitalist class today is to stop all expenditure on public health: those parts of NHS that cannot be successfully privatised must just wither away or be at the mercy of charities.
What is clear is that the NHS cannot be defended by appeals to the government. The only way to defeat the bill is to bring down the government that is hell-bent on destroying the NHS, and with it the capitalist system that places profit above the lives of working people.
This means demanding that the TUC leaders stop mouthing their support for the NHS and the gains of the Welfare State and start organising a general strike to bring down the government.
Those trade union leaders who refuse to lead this fight must be immediately removed and replaced with a new, revolutionary leadership that will lead the fight to not just kick out the coalition but replace it with a workers government that will go forward to socialism and ensure a universal health system completely free at the point of delivery.
