Review by Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot Labour Party member.
In a hard-hitting ITV documentary last Tuesday, The Dirty War on the NHS, John Pilger, the distinguished journalist, interviewed many clinicians in the National Health Service who believe that the NHS is under attack through backdoor privatisation. The programme was also a critique of austerity. The scandal is that this programme was broadcast days after the general election and not before it.
Pilger interviewed a Dr Bob Hill, who said that the NHS has increasingly become an organisation for profit extraction. In 2018, £92 million was spent on private ambulances and taxis and thousands of operations are outsourced to private hospitals. In 2019 , more than ever, the NHS was farmed out to private companies.
Pilger traced this back to the Thatcher years and unfortunately, it continued with Blair and New Labour. Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) involved the use of private money for new hospitals. In total, 124 hospitals were built under PFI. £11 billion was borrowed and this will cost the NHS £80 billion over 30 years. The debt burden has resulted in the closure of non-PFI hospitals and the disposal of land. It also results in health care being subordinate to the servicing of massive debt.
Another means of milking the NHS has been the use of management consultants. Bristol University reported that consulting fees are costing £640m and concluded that they are making the health service worse. Since the Tories came to power in 2010, annual increases in health spending have fallen from 4% to 1%. This has resulted in some of the lowest bed capacities in Europe. Bodies such as the NHS Partners Network are nothing more lobbying groups seeking contracts from the health service.
USA: 87 million without health insurance
Last, but not least, was the scandal of the first hospital to be run privately. A hospital in Cambridgeshire was taken over by a company called Circle Group
Staff even had 49% of the shares. Staff explained that the company was only interested in making a profit. The Care Quality Commission concluded that they were endangering patient care. The hospital was put into special measures and taken back under NHS control. The guy who headed Circle Group has set up a new company which advances the idea that new technologies could replace many clinicians. Doctors interviewed by Pilger believed that this could prove dangerous.
Pilger travels across the Pond. America relies on private health insurance and over 87 million people have no insurance or are under insured 20,000 Americans die each year because they can’t get treatment. The principle cause of bankruptcy is due to medical bills. The health insurance companies have the power to prevent life-saving operations and the programme gave evidence of this happening. Finally, US hospitals can literally dump patients in order to free up beds for new admissions.
We in Britain can at least expect better. However, a form of patient dumping is emerging here in the UK. A homeless charity worker confirmed that some people arrive in their shelter while still in hospital clothing. This was also a concern of a doctor who Pilger interviewed. There is much more. This documentary is a must-see and it confirms everything that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour election campaign attempted to express but which was unfortunately drowned out by the din of Brexit.
The programme is still available on catch-up TV here.
December 19, 2019
