NHS trust hospitals and Primary Care Trusts are to be charged 10 per cent interest on money they borrow from their strategic Health Authority from today.
This is part of an ‘overhaul’ of NHS finances. The deficit is to be deducted from their next year’s finances, plus 10 per cent interest.
Failing trusts, that is trusts that provide excellent patient care but fail to make a profit, will be able to borrow the money from the NHS bank, which previously did not impose any interest charges at all.
Hospitals with a surplus, no doubt acquired by turning patients away, rationing care, and sending patients home early after their operations are to be rewarded by getting 20 per cent interest back on any money that they are able to invest in the bank.
This they can use to make new cash relations with the growing private sector if they wish, to produce surpluses that can take even more advantage of the 20 per cent interest available from the NHS Bank. This is all part of the health jungle or health market that the Labour government is now introducing.
The logic of the new financial discipline is that NHS trusts that have their next year’s cash cut by their deficit plus 10 per cent will have to make very severe cuts before they are able to balance their books. If they cannot they will see their annual finances slashed, and be forced to close.
Consultants, nurses, doctors and ancillary staff will have to be shown the door in droves to break even.
The hospital will be much diminished as far as being a provider of the best health care in the most disease free circumstances is concerned, but it will have broken even, which is a much more important target as far as the Labour government is concerned.
Then, in the next financial year if another extraordinary effort is made to further cut heath care and staff, it will make a surplus that it can invest at 20 per cent interest in the NHS bank.
Then it will be rated a success. Its standard of health care and levels of cleanliness may well have plummeted, but it will be making a profit. It will have become a successful health business that puts profit before patient care.
Hospitals that put patient care before making a profit will be cut, damned as failures, and either closed or sold off to the private sector or a profit making trust, to knock it into shape.
This great change begins today when health trusts will be charged up to 10 per cent for borrowing money, while trusts which invest their surpluses will receive 20 per cent interest payments.
To see the scale of the planned sackings, cutbacks and even closures that this financial mechanism will force, one has only to know that one in four trusts failed to balance their books last year, leaving the NHS in over £200 million of debt. This year the deficit is set to reach £750 million, and be on its way to £1 billion.
NHS trusts have already announced 4,000 job cuts in recent weeks, with expectations that the number of job cuts will reach 40,000, and be across the board from consultants to doctors, nurses and cleaning staff.
The NHS trade unions, BMA, RCN, UNISON, TGWU and GMB plus the Radiographers and others must reject this latest attempt to privatise the NHS.
They must call a national day of action to defend the NHS and urge the TUC trade unions, whose members and families depend on the NHS for their health care, to take strike action on that day.
However, a one day action will not deter the Blair- Brown government which is dedicated to privatising the NHS and smashing the Welfare State.
A one day action will prepare the way for an indefinite general strike to bring down this bosses’ government to go forward to a workers’ government that will end the privatisation of the NHS and nationalise the banks and drug companies to raise the cash to further develop the NHS.
