A private healthcare company, called Circle, has held the contract for running Hinchingbrooke, the UK’s only privately-run NHS hospital. Two years into the contract, and having boasted that it had “transformed services at Hinchingbrooke”, Circle is dumping the contract on financial grounds, citing a lack of funding and pressure on the casualty department. As an opponent of privatisation said, ““This illustrates the folly of private sector involvement in our NHS. When the going gets tough, the private sector gets going – and dumps NHS patients. The privatisation experiment has lamentably failed”.
Circle is accused of bad management: “little internal or clear external oversight of how the trust managed risks to the quality of care”; a lack of “clarity or coherence” over who was “responsible for the oversight and scrutiny of the trust’s quality agenda”; poor hygiene standards; “poor care provided to patients”, and, perhaps most damning of all, a “blame approach, rather than that of a supportive and patient focused approach”. (Edited version of a New Statesman article, 9 Jan 2015)
This change to the National Health Service have been ideological, promoted by a bunch whose experience of managing even a whelk stall is zero, but who have been filled with damaging neo-liberal, half-digested, ideas from American so-called “think-tanks” (the “think” bit is an unintended joke). “Experts” say that the NHS is failing and is way behind the US. Wait long enough and expert Americans will tell you so! But then it is run on a percentage of GDP almost half that of the bureaucratic US version. Along with New Zealand the UK has the lowest health costs of any advanced economy. If the Conservatives win the election watch all the costs will go up and the quality go down – it has to to provide a profit and the CEO’s salary (we know a lot about that!) What a way to run a health system!
Epicureans are not supposed to involve themselves in politics, but they took my vote away
and I have no congressional vote where I live, so (non sequitur), since I am de-democratized I can say what I like.
Dr. Mark Porter, head of the British Medical Association, told the Guardian the following yesterday :
Patients could have to start to pay charges to use basic NHS services such as GPs because the health service’s finances have become so dire. Whoever took office after the general election would inevitably be tempted to bring in charges and may not be deterred by the unpopularity of such a seismic change to the health service.
“I think they will be tempted. They said in 1950 that a Labour government wouldn’t introduce charging and it did.”
The existence of such charges for some areas of healthcare could
persuade ministers to extend fees to others, Porter said. The health
service in England raises about 1% of its income from charging for
services such as prescriptions and dental care.
Porter said it would be “inescapable” that the next government would consider introducing fees as a way of tackling the £30bn budget gap that NHS England has forecast will open by 2020 unless it achieves its target of £22bn in efficiency savings and receives £8bn of extra annual funding from the Treasury at a time when overall public finances remain under pressure.
“You say it’s politically toxic. It’s not, really, is it? Look at
dentistry and look at social care. They carry with them exactly the same offer to the public by which the NHS was set up; that we will remove from you – this society, us acting collectively – the terrible fear of bankrupting yourself by having an illness, by needing healthcare.
“And yet we allow people to be bankrupted by social care and we allow people to be deterred from seeking dental care because of charges,” Porter said.
“Your question was: could a future government be tempted? Yes, they could, but they must resist that temptation.”
Why is it that in Washington DC you have no congressional vote? That seems extremely bizarre to me.
It’s a long story, but starts when the Constitution was written. Washington had a handful of people, all civil servants. They were thought of as servants of the people who shouldn’t vote, or might be biased ( as if we aren’t all of us biased in some way or another) Nowadays Washington has about 700,000 people, more than some Western states. They tried to do a deal a few yearsago whereby the Republicans would be given an extra seat if D C got one, but it never went through. So 700,000 still have no representative in Congress. About 80% of Americans don’t know this, let alone foreigners. Undemocratic? Yes. But then we are talking about a den of iniquity that “bosses us around and takes our hard- won income for taxes”. So we don’t matter too much, I guess. This, despite the fact that I am hard-pressed to name a single Federal employee I know in this city.
The British Royal Mail was privatized at a loss to the taxpayers of a reported £180 million pounds. The beneficiaries have been the banks and investors who bought at bargain basement rates. Typical scam.to benefit the chums of the politicians. I remember when first class mail was delivered the next day. Trans-Atlantic mail previously took 5 days, not unreasonable. Here is the on-the-ground result of privatization: two birthday cards recently sent me on March 10th arrived on April 7th and April8th respectively. Apparently, this new company stacks mail up in piles until there is an ” economic” quantity to deliver, which could take weeks if you live in a country spot. Of course, no one is going to use the old fashioned mail any more and a dim government and stupid investors will have finally destroyed the world’s first, and once best, mail delivery service. That’s why this British government should be held accountablle. But the public is so ignorant they are likely to vote these incompetents back in.