PRIMARY CARE Trusts are to be abolished and replaced by Federations of GPs who will purchase healthcare for their patients from both the public and private sectors, utilising £80bn of the health budget to do so.
There will be between 300 and 500 GP Federations across England, expected to work directly with a new ‘NHS Commissioning Board’.
To handle the massive procurement amounts, they will have to bring in large private companies who will see to it that the private sector consumes the bulk of the NHS budget and grows fat on it.
They will also see to it that the £20bn of cuts are carried out in this parliament, by making stipulations to NHS hospitals as to how they must be run, and staffed, and what wages they should pay before commissioning them for the provision of services.
The privatisation process is to be aided by extending the formation of private social enterprise status to NHS Foundation Trusts, and then to the whole sector.
Foundation Trusts will no longer figure on the public sector balance sheet, and will be able to buy and sell services, sell off land, borrow money from banks, and sell shares to ‘their workers’.
They will be proper businesses, complete with the freedom to go bankrupt, as well as having the power to decide on staff levels, terms and conditions of service and having the right to hire and fire their staff.
They will also have to play their part in finding the £20 billion of NHS cuts over the current parliament, at a rate of five per cent a year.
They will work hand in glove with the private sector pirates who will presumably be able to purchase hospitals that were previously part of the NHS and are now social partnerships.
GPs and GP federations who will be holding £80bn in their hands – and the private companies that will handle procurement – will have the power of life and death over hospitals, deciding which they will work with and which will be cut and closed.
They will force hospitals to compete for their commissioning cash.
GPs consortia will also have to compete with each other for their patients, since GP practice boundaries are to be scrapped as patients are given ‘more power’ to choose the GPs they want, and to allow the emergence of ‘super surgeries’.
The worship of the right of the middle class to choose will set the scene for GP Federations to give ultimatums to hospitals to ‘reform’ – or else be shut.
With the use of the Patient Choice weapon to cut, close and privatise, Lansley is carrying on from where Blair and Milburn left off.
Lansley says: ‘Patients will take more control over their own care.’ However, GPs at the same time will also ‘have to manage patient expectations, based on the limit of NHS resources’ adds Lansley.
He says: ‘At the moment, as an analogy, GPs are taking the trolley loaded with goods to the checkout, and the PCT is standing there at the checkout with a credit card, saying, “I don’t want this and I don’t want that”.’
He wants GPs who will be able to say to patients exercising choice: ‘What you want is too expensive. However, there is a way forward with just a little additional payment or an insurance policy.’
Meanwhile, the Department of Health is to be slimmed down to one fifth of its size. It is to be made redundant since the plan is for private medicine to take over the NHS. There will be no need for it.
The TUC and the trade unions must spell it out to Lansley and the Tories that they will answer this attack with a general strike to bring down the coalition. Former generations did not sacrifice and struggle to gain the NHS for us to lose it and accept its abolition by the Tories.
