Upcoming
UK election outcome will be decisive for this crucial issue
Health
professionals accuse the Tories of willfully destroying the NHS by
starving it of cash it needs to operate safely. This brings to mind
the comments of Tory Party grandee Oliver Letwin who in 2004
allegedly told a private meeting that NHS would cease to exist in
five years of a Tory government. Letwin, then advisor to the Tory
chancellor, also offered a book titled Privatising the World. Later,
what he said actually comes true, albeit a bit later than he had
predicted.
Sharmini
Peries of The
Real News talked with Kam Sandhu, journalist and
co-founder of the UK-based Real Media, about Tories' effort to
privatize National Health Service in the UK. Sandhu says there is
evidence that Tories plan to sell off assets to service NHS; this is
the first sign of distress and it will lead to privatization.
In the UK,
Tories are traditionally committed to the neoliberal agenda,
especially since Thatcher era and beyond. This includes massive
privatizations of public assets and services. The National Health
Service in the UK has been one of the most successful healthcare
systems in the West, run publicly. Yet, the conservatives (and to
some extent the Labour before Corbyn) have been fully taken over by
the big business lobbyists who have tried for decades to loot NHS,
mainly because they are pursuing more tax-breaks and opportunities
for more profits from the healthcare sector.
As has
been pointed, the Conservatives support budget
cuts in the name of fiscal discipline and stability, which, of
course, at the end of the tunnel leads to one thing: further tax-cuts
for the super-rich.
Sandhu also
pointed out:
It is an
absolute lie that the NHS is not being sold off. We can explain that
in a recent appearance by Theresa May on the Andrew Neil show where
she said that she backs the Naylor Report.
Within the
Naylor Report, which Theresa May now says she backs, it's written
into it that the property and the assets and the buildings that the
NHS holds, needs to be sold off, and they'll be incentivized to be
sold off in a way that the NHS won't be able to access public
funding.
Campaigners
say about £20 billion has been removed since the Conservatives came
to power in 2010. They're using all these incentives to get the NHS
to open up its assets, which moves us much, much closer to
privatization, and shows the lie really of what Theresa May said in a
different interview in not so far apart.
There is
massive public opposition to things like privatization, to the idea
of charging, but these changes have taken place outside of the public
view. These are huge transformations that are happening under the
guises of really boring names, stuff like STPs, really vague and kind
of obtuse ways of bringing in these changes. There has been mass
transformation, and unfortunately the media has failed to kind of
challenge what's happening.
It's quite
surprising that only three years ago, the NHS was regarded as the
best healthcare system in the world by an international panel of
experts. Bottom in that same league was the American system, largely
because it spent a lot on healthcare and got some of the worst
outcomes. Despite those facts, we are very much moving towards an
American-style system. Campaigners I've spoken to say that there
is no doubt that we are moving towards that kind of system.
Simon
Stevens, who was appointed head of NHS England in 2014, has been one
of the figures who's really drove through some of these changes in
his Five Year Forward Plan. That Five Year Forward Plan separates
England into 44 footprints or regions. It's good to note here that
this is happening only in England. This is not happening in Scotland.
This is not happening in Wales. Perhaps that gives light to the idea
that this is very concentrated, and that perhaps it's strange that
they're making it seem so necessary that it has to happen when we
have two functioning public services continuing in the countries next
to us. These regions, these 44 regions, then are given budgets that
they now need to manage, which is something that they've never done
before. The campaigners I spoke to said that it's a way of
fragmenting the service. The pressures are being piled on in
different ways in different areas. It's much more difficult for these
regions to understand what's happening between them. One expert that
I spoke to said that, while the media does talk about funding and
that does come up from time to time, the NHS does appear in the news
for a bit and then disappears, they're not talking about
privatization. They're not talking about the presence of US
companies. They're not talking about the pressures that health
workers are under and the suppressed wages. We have stories of nurses
going to food banks, and it's estimated that by the end of the
decade, they will have experienced a 12% pay cut.
The ways
that these pressures are manifesting on our NHS is not being
communicated, but Oliver Letwin did write a book called Privatising
the World. He did advise the government as a health advisor, and he
said in that book, in order to privatize a service, you need to
artificially distress it in order to make the need for private
companies to come in, which is something that we've seen happen. As a
result of that, we're seeing some services being cut. We're seeing
people turned away from privately-run services now because they say
they're reached their quota. This is now changing the tradition of 65
years of a universal healthcare system in the UK.
If you
imagine a hospital budget, they also have these PFI loans, which are
very, very toxic loans taken out, kind of mostly under the Blair
government but a little bit in the Major government before that. The
Conservatives now have signed up to the same deals. It means that
people have estimated we'll be paying back £300 billion for £56
billion worth of assets over 30 years. Now that, those loan payments,
have to come out of hospital budgets. At the same time, those
hospital budgets are being cut, so the money that these hospitals are
trying to operate with is depleting. I do want to raise that we have
the second lowest expenditure on healthcare in the G7, so this idea
that we are unable to afford this system when it already is one of
the lowest spend is really a myth.
We have a
guy who was vice president of a big healthcare insurer in the US, and
we have that company also buying up contracts in the US with policy
waved through by Simon Stevens. He said that his 44 footprint plan
would be an enormous opportunity for the private sector. For me, I'm
seeing huge conflicts of interest in this man.
I certainly
think Corbyn's promise to protect the NHS is going to massively work
in his favor. To give you one factor, in 2015, Election Unspun did
some research into the media coverage of certain subjects. They found
that the Conservatives were trusted more on the economy, and that
Labour was trusted more on the NHS. Yet in the final few weeks
before that election, the NHS was taken off the top five subjects
that were being discussed. The NHS has always been something that
people believe Labour will protect, so I think that will work in
their favor. But I'm not sure if it's been communicated really
what's at stake here, the changes to our living standards and the way
that we operate and the changes to our society if we lose the NHS.
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