How our NHS is being privatised: what’s happened so far and what’s coming next!
Stage 1 (1991-2014): Preparing the ground for wholesale privatisation. These steps have already been achieved!
Stage 2: 2014-2020
The next stage is wholesale privatisation of the NHS
Stage 3 The goal (2020 and beyond): US- style privatised healthcare
Stage 1 (1991-2014): Preparing the ground for wholesale privatisation. These steps have already been achieved!
- Reorganise NHS to prepare for privatisation: create a purchaser-provider split (1991) starting with an internal NHS market and later opening the market to private healthcare. Start with non-clinical (cleaning and catering), moving to services like audiology.
- PFI-funded hospitals with facilities management: 30-year contracts - providing massive year on year private profit from NHS funds
- Start in the public ‘comfort zone’: some NHS funding has always gone to voluntary sector services – hospices, voluntary groups and community-based innovative services. Most GPs are private contractors. Use these examples to provide reassurance and argue that privatisation is nothing new.
- Require all NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups to tender services; start with routine procedures and tests; use the NHS brand to hide the reality of privatisation
- Force and encourage NHS patients to use private providers; get patients used to it.
- Pay a standard tariff for NHS procedures regardless of how complex the patient’s needs; allow the private sector to cherry pick and exclude patients with additional or complex needs who need more intensive and costly care. The NHS funds additional costs.
- Health & Social Care Act 2012, forces competitive tendering;
- Remove the Government’s legal duty to provide a comprehensive, free, health service
- Remove commissioning support provided by NHS England, forcing CCG commissioners to seek external commissioning support – generally from the likes of KPMG and McKinsey
- Impose massive real term cuts in funding and services; do not fund the extra cost of PFI
- Criticise the NHS whenever possible;
- Cover up and ignore failures by private companies
- Reassure the public:
- · Up to now, patients will experience few changes in their services
- · Privately-owned services masquerade under the familiar NHS logo
- · Showcase the private deals for very high tech equipment & flash new buildings
- · Health services remain ‘free at the point of delivery’
- Agree EU and Atlantic trade treaties that mean in future all public services will have to be put out to tender (EU procurement regulations; TTIP Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).
Stage 2: 2014-2020
The next stage is wholesale privatisation of the NHS
- All NHS services will be tendered to comply with international trade agreements; all tenders will be open to private healthcare companies
- TTIP treaties make marketisation and privatisation changes irreversible by national governments
- Government require that CCG contracts are tendered in smaller packages – supposedly to help the voluntary sector tender for contracts; in reality to facilitate cherry-picking of profitable services by private corporations
- NHS is left responsible for unprofitable services: A&E and care of people with long-term & complex conditions
- NHS starved of funds; people who can pay for top-up insurance (expect 95% by 2020)
Stage 3 The goal (2020 and beyond): US- style privatised healthcare
- Hospitals, GPs and community services all openly run by private companies
- A rump NHS provides a ‘safety-net’ delivering emergency and minimal care
- Anyone who can is forced to buy private insurance
- Massive profits for private healthcare providers
- terrible health inequalities and private debt for individuals
