Yesterday the NHS was officially opened up by the coalition government to the vultures of the private healthcare industry, whose only aim is to make millions off the backs of the sick.
October 1st was the day when the NHS commissioning board took up the legal responsibility for dishing out £85 billion of public money to ‘any willing provider’ – the most willing being those private companies out to make a quick buck.
Writing in the Guardian the head of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, waxed lyrical about this ‘landmark day’ saying: ‘The board exists, in a nutshell, to turn £85 billion of public money into the best possible healthcare for patients. This can be done only by placing patients at the heart of every decision we take and by supporting clinical commissioning groups to shape service around local public and patient needs.’
In a ‘nutshell’ the commissioning board is designed purely to hand over the NHS budget to the privateers.
This was brought out quite clearly in a briefing issued by an outfit called Catalyst and made public just two weeks ago.
Catalyst is a company described as ‘corporate finance advisers who specialise in healthcare’ and their advice to the bloodsuckers of the private health industry boils down to get stuck in and make a fortune out of the NHS.
Their briefing stated that there is now ‘significant opportunity for the private sector in primary and secondary care’ – an opportunity they boast will make £20 billion from the NHS in the next few years by taking over GP services and setting up new community health clinics.
This is the brave new world of the NHS under the Health and Social Care Act – an NHS run by clinical commissioning groups with access to 80% of the NHS budget accountable to the government, whose remit is to implement the privatisation of the NHS and provide a bonanza for the big, multi-national corporations.
Unfortunately for Nicholson, on the very day that he chose to write his glowing endorsement of privatisation, evidence emerged about what it really means for the NHS and patients.
In 2009 the biggest pathology laboratory in the NHS was taken over by Serco, a multinational company, in a deal worth £800 million.
This was one of the ‘public/private partnerships’ so highly praised by both Labour and Tory governments.
The laboratory, which performs vital NHS work in analysing blood and tissue samples sent in by doctors from all over the country, was discovered to have experienced 400 clinical ‘incidents’ in 2011 – a fact only uncovered following a freedom of information demand by the independent group Corporate Watch.
These incidents included losing and mislabelling samples while test results were delayed, in 14 cases this led to a breach in the critical risk level.
Along with these disasters the company recorded a financial loss of £5.9 million last year and had to be bailed out by cash transfers from NHS hospitals!
The losses were put down to higher than expected costs in running the laboratory.
So here in a ‘nutshell’ is privatisation and pushing everything out to a ‘willing provider’ – these companies expect to make a fortune and if for any reason they don’t, then the NHS budget will always keep them afloat until they can cut costs through cutting staff and wages.
With the very existence of the NHS under dire threat from the coalition and the bankrupt capitalist system that it serves, the working class, along with its middle class allies, must demand immediate action by the leadership of the unions – the organisation of an indefinite general strike to bring down the government and replace it with a workers government that will preserve and extend a free health service and advance society to socialism.
