‘Very deliberately the government wishes to turn back the clock to the 1930s and 1940s, when there were private, charitable and co-operative providers of healthcare,’ warns Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the BMA’s hospital consultant committee.
Expressing his concerns that the Health and Social Care Bill will result in wholesale privatisation, Dr Porter added yesterday: ‘But that system failed to provide comprehensive and universal service for the citizens of this country.
‘That’s why health was nationalised.
‘But they’re proposing to go back to the days before the NHS.’
He further warned that changes contained in the Bill would create an ‘increasingly tattered safety net’ for people suffering from complex illnesses such as heart failure, diabetes or obesity, as care would return to ‘what we thought we had left behind when we founded the NHS in 1948’.
Dr Porter warned: ‘We fear that one unintended but inevitable effect of the Bill will be to reintroduce the patchwork provision that marked services in this country before the NHS, where many people did not get the care they needed because, while many hospitals gave good service, you didn’t get the good service we have today.’
NHS services in England could be ‘destabilised’ by private firms taking advantage of the Bill’s ‘any willing provider’ clause to win contracts for patients with easy-to-treat conditions.
This could lead to NHS hospitals no longer offering a full range of services.
Private healthcare firms could ‘cherry pick’ patients with the simplest conditions to treat while NHS hospitals could face closure if they are forced to compete with private providers.
Dr Porter warned that the Bill would result in a system like America which has ‘quite big geographical disparities’ of care available, while ‘tens of millions of people can’t get access to high-quality treatment’.
His comments came as it emerged that at least 50 hospitals could face closure as a result of the £20bn cuts already hitting the NHS.
Also, about 70 hospital trusts in England have failed to achieve the financial performance and quality of care necessary to become foundation trusts, and ‘a significant number’ have ‘large recurrent deficits’, according to the King’s Fund.
In a report titled Reconfiguring Hospital Services the pro-privatisation think-tank warned of ‘a downward spiral of falling income, growing deficit and declining quality (which) will cause hospitals to fail.’
Calculations by the Health Service Journal, based on projections prepared for the Department of Health, suggest that at least 58 NHS hospitals will not be able to cover their costs if cuts planned by primary care trusts to ‘low priority’ treatments – such as tonsillectomies, injections for back pain and varicose vein surgery – go ahead.
Last week the BMA published a poll which found that about 65 per cent of GPs believe competition between providers, including NHS and private companies, will reduce the quality of patient care.
Public sector union Unison Head of Health Karen Jennings said last Thursday: ‘The government would be foolish to ignore the fears of those doctors who have many years of NHS experience behind them.
‘This damning survey highlights doctors’ belief that this Bill will lead to fragmentation, poorer patient care and increased health inequalities.
‘The Bill is a toxic prescription for NHS patients.’
