David Cameron blatantly lied to the country over NHS privatisation, says the co-leader of the National Health Action Party on the eve of his protest marathon to the Tory party conference.
Dr Clive Peedell, who’s running 42 miles on Sunday morning from the HQ of NHS England in Leeds to Manchester, says there’s incontrovertible evidence that the Coalition is privatising the NHS – despite repeated claims by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats that their NHS reforms would not lead to increasing privatisation.
Dr Peedell, the co-chair of the NHS Consultants Association also insists that privatisation of the NHS is a false economy as it is both expensive and inefficient.
In an article for Open Democracy, Dr Peedell demonstrates there is clear evidence that:
The Health and Social Care Act clearly fulfils all the commonly accepted criteria for healthcare privatisation, proving the Prime Minister has clearly misled the public, or in common language – lied.
He goes on:
If the public knew the full implications of what this would actually mean for the NHS, potential support for private provision of NHS services would plummet.
Dr Peedell argues forcefully against the assertion that it doesn’t matter who provides the service as long it’s free.
Privatisation needs a market… Market systems drain billions of pounds from the NHS budget and away from frontline care, by the creation of a huge bureaucracy of commercial contracts, accounting, legal challenges, advertising and billing.
He points out that administration costs of the NHS soared from 5% to 14% of total budget when Margaret Thatcher introduced the NHS internal market in 1991; this, he says, will increase further as “the current system is even more complex, bureaucratic and costly with three levels of bureaucracy replaced with seven”.
Dr Peedell explains that:
Private firms cherry pick the most profitable services… and leave local NHS Hospitals underfunded to pick up the pieces and deal with everything else they are expected to deal with – the full and comprehensive range of healthcare services to local communities.
And he warns that privatisation:
creates a vicious circle of increasing health care costs and financial pressure on the NHS. It leads to staff cuts, hospital and ward closures, increased waiting lists, and fewer core services provided by the NHS.
He explains how staff transfers from NHS hospitals to private hospitals (which don’t train their own staff) take vital expertise out of the NHS and how “patients have different parts of their care performed in different hospitals depending on the contracts that CCGs have signed up to. Quality is put at risk, expertise diluted, and costs driven up.”
He predicts that a failing NHS will only help boost private healthcare insurance for those that can afford it, “signalling the death knell for a universal healthcare service, free at the point of use.”
And he attacks “the revolving doors culture between the private health firms, politicians, think tanks, and civil servants within the Department of Health”.
Dr Peedell also demonstrates how the economy is damaged by the use of the private sector in the NHS:
Since public funds are used to pay for private sector provision of NHS services, taxpayers’ money is going directly into the profits of multi-national private companies and their shareholders. It is diverted away from direct patient care, and also diverted outside of our economy. Many of these companies are also registered in offshore tax havens. Privatisation of the NHS is a false economy.
