Nhs PLC: The Privatisation of Our Health Care

The National Health Service used to plan and fund to meet patient needs, providing free and fair access for all. But in this superb book, Allyson Pollock shows how Labour is destroying this great working class achievement. Labour pushes the IMF, World Bank, European Union agenda of opening up all public services - water, energy, sewerage, telecoms, post and health - to private firms. So health care is becoming a commodity as in the USA, where billing and marketing make up 30% of health care costs. In the USA, fraud by health care companies totalled $418 billion in 1990-95. For example, Columbia/HCA (allegedly helped by the British consultancy firm KPMG) defrauded the government of $1.7 billion. In 2004, Labour lifted the ceiling on health administration costs, which had already doubled, cutting clinical care budgets so that there are fewer beds in PFI hospitals. Labour excludes doctors, nurses and health professionals from hospital management, while welcoming failed businessmen. Surgery performed in private hospitals costs 40% more than in NHS hospitals, because of higher costs and the overriding need to return a profit to the shareholders. Private borrowing is dearer too and the risks are not transferred to the private sector. Labour has arranged public spending data and NHS accounts to hide the huge amounts of public money going straight through the NHS to private companies. In 2002, Labour privatised practice premises through the introduction of Local Improvement Finance Trusts, which shifted control of primary care services from GPs to corporations. And Labour has forced local authorities to divest themselves of all their social service assets, including long-term care for the elderly, ending equal access to equal quality of care for older people. Labour uses dirty PR tricks to defeat public opposition - smearing public services, lying about the huge inefficiencies of market-based health and social care, overriding evidence, bullying and sacking critics. Like the Liberals and the Tories, Labour aims to destroy the NHS. There is an alternative, which we all know.