‘A once fair and efficient public NHS is being replaced by corporate interests driving the agenda’

• WE no longer have a real National Health Service.

The crisis of the unloved NHS deepens daily as a result of long-term disinvestment in front-line patient care. There’s a huge lack of beds, facilities, nurses, doctors, GPs and other staff.

The serious wrecking began with the 2012 act from the coalition government and is reaching the final stages with a new Health and Social Care Bill going through parliament.

Are we to get rid of the true NHS after years of taking away the means to secure its future? The bill puts paid to recovering the NHS.

Private companies with NHS contracts already sit on boards deciding how NHS funding is spent, which constitutes a conflict of interest.

Their powers would increase and run counter to good practice rooted in medical ethics. Patients, councillors, MPs, staff and residents would have no effective say.

The health secretary’s legal duty to provide health care to all, free at the point of delivery, a provision fundamental to NHS values, is no longer.

Instead the failed USA model of ICOs, integrated care organisations, which serves insurance companies is being installed in “the NHS”.

It has not delivered for the American public and it will not deliver here. The American health system cannot be underestimated in its social and economic divisiveness, bad value for money, and lack of human values.

A once fair and efficient public NHS is being replaced by corporate interests driving the agenda.

To the international health industry the NHS is the prize of the century, and we are the mugs. No USA trade deal is needed to make it happen.

The pandemic is another cover to replace the true public NHS with private imposters under its logo.

The public NHS was integrated, inventive and imperfect.

The “fake” NHS is based on the disintegration of honest health care. In order to make money patients must go without, and it will be “their choice”.

Private companies supported by government took advantage of Covid-19 to inflate their profits at public expense. Yet the experience, innovation, dedication and team spirit of the public NHS saved the day.

We can get down to the real issues and insist on a total rethink.

Everything was against the founding of the public NHS except the people, including soldiers returning from World War II who wanted a better society.

The main political parties proclaim they are “against privatisation” and how much they “love” the NHS. This is tired old rubbish.

Do they know any more what is meant by “NHS”? Who can put that meaning into practice? Are they committed to full reinstatement of the public NHS?

The waiting lists of several millions of people are not fundamentally the outcome of the pandemic.

It has been exacerbating a chronic condition. Long years of “efficiency savings”, major destructive “reorganisations”, “marketing”, “choices” (rationing) for patients, and “competition for contracts,” have all been serving the interests of private gain.

The public purse and hard-pressed NHS staff have done all the giving. Why have such valuable employees been treated so badly for so long and driven away?

Each year tens of billions of pounds of NHS resources are squandered on management consultancies and the administration of internal marketing and contracts. Large sums of the new £36billion to 2024 for health and social care will go that way too.

It is less than the £37billion given last year in one go to government “friendly” private firms for an inadequate test and trace product. Expect more of this kind of “spending on the NHS”.

Yet this is our money and we need to follow it. If we are going to get back a real NHS with decent services it will cost an arm and a leg. But this bill will cost much more if it passes.

SHARON LYTTON
Cromwell Avenue, N6