Thousands of health workers, patients, trade unionists and young people will be joining the mass protests to ‘Save Our NHS’ outside Parliament today.
‘Make no mistake, this is our last chance to save the NHS,’ warned Unison head of health, Christina McAnea.
The Unite union added: ‘In less than three months the government’s Health and Social Care Bill will be law. ‘This is a national emergency. The bill must be dropped.’
In fact, the ‘amendments’ and ‘changes to the bill’ have worsened it, proving that the bill must be smashed in its entirety.
The Health and Social Care Bill, outsources and privatises the commissioning and delivery of NHS care. The NHS will become a huge public private partnership on a much larger scale than PFI. Multinational corporations would in effect control the commissioning budget, and together with private providers, make huge profits at taxpayers and patients’ expense.
The Bill in combination with the £20bn McKinsey restructuring cuts, is designed to crash through a mass hospital closure programme.
Patient entitlement to free NHS care, especially hospital care, would be drastically reduced and denied, as patients will be driven to take out insurance or go without care.
The NHS was founded on the principles that everyone, would be provided access to comprehensive healthcare, free at the point of use.
The structures that made that possible, were
– the legal framework whereby the Secretary of State ( SoS ) for Health had a duty to provide comprehensive care for all.
– Publicly owned infrastructure; public funding from taxation; public administration to distribute these funds fairly according to clinical need; a nationalised hospital network and public provided community services with public sector staff, and a special contract with GPs to provide care for NHS patients without making profit for shareholders.
Also, a national system of training and education; and national terms and conditions of service for staff.
The Bill abolishes the legal basis of the NHS, facilitates reduction in funding from taxation and the promotion of funding by the patient, and dismantles the NHS structures that made fulfilment of the founding principles possible.
The Bill legislates away responsibility of the SoS.
SHAs and PCTs, which had a mandatory duty to provide hospital, GP, community and preventive care for geographically defined populations, based on accurate needs assessment and resource allocation, are abolished.
Arms length bodies, the NHS commissioning board (NCB), Monitor and the Care Quality Commission, are to run the NHS autonomously and set up a market of competitive providers, governed by EU competition law.
The Bill decrees the new commissioners the NHS Commissioning Board and the Clinical Commissioning Groups, drive in this market, through adherence to a ‘choice mandate’ to contract with the private sector. The ‘Any Qualified provider’ mechanism using a fixed tariff, will give way to contracts allocated through competitive tendering. Commissioners will decide, on the basis of price competition, which provider company the patient will be referred to.
The actual job of commissioning, will be done by private “freestanding” commissioning support companies, such as KPMG, United Health, McKinsey, McKesson, Atos, Capita, Deloitte, to whom contracts are already being given.
Service Redesign proposes the mass closure of NHS acute hospitals which are publicly provided, and the shift of funding to ‘community care’ which is privately provided. The bill ends NHS hospital trusts and requires them all to become Foundation trusts.
Anna Athow a BMA council member told News Line: ‘Protest action is not enough to save the NHS. What is needed is for the TUC to take action to call a general strike to bring this government down!’
