Owl says: Do not be mislead into thinking, when reading this article, that the NHS has stopped privatisation. In fact, it simply makes it cheaper and easier for private companies to compete with the NHS.
“… In the wave after wave of attacks on the NHS launched by the right, the issue of values is brushed aside. The monopoly of the NHS must be broken. Forget the principles of the co-operative: in practice, runs the argument, it becomes an inefficient monopoly of production and delivery that must be challenged by private sector competition. The NHS can still be free at the point of use, but the structures that provide health must be the closest simulacrum to a market as possible. The NHS can be reduced to a brand that houses a hyperefficient network of private sector deliverers competing for contracts.
Hence the Andrew Lansley health “reforms” in 2012 that compelled the NHS to outsource delivery. But the same thinking informed the Tories’ engagement across the public sector. Thus justice secretary Chris Grayling’s probation service “reforms” in 2013 and the normally sane Philip Hammond, as defence secretary, agreeing that army recruitment could be contracted out to Capita in 2012. Tory antipathy to the public sector was given free rein, the lush public outsourcing industry was turbo-boosted – and the public sector fragmented.
Last week saw the death knell of all three “reforms” and with it a pillar of thinking that sustains the current Tory party. Thursday’s call by NHS England to repeal section 75 of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act, which requires every significant contract worth cumulatively more than £600K to be outsourced in any circumstance, replacing them with a best value test, is a watershed. It will empower commissioners to weigh up whether the loss of an integrated, co-operative service by outsourcing offsets any short-term financial gain. A health system is a structure of interconnected moving parts that requires co-ordination, backed by the overriding principle that the alpha and omega of decision making is care, not maximum profit. …”
East Devon Watch 