Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (centre) and Health Secretary Wes Streeting (left), with NHS CEO Amanda Pritchard (right) during a visit to Elective Orthopaedic Centre in Epsom, Surrey, to highlight his ‘plan for change’ commitments on health, January 6, 2025
TARGETING a 20 per cent increase in the use of the private sector to cut waiting lists risks “permanently embedding the profit-taking parasite” into the health service, campaigners have warned.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer claimed he is “not interested in putting ideology before patients” as he unveiled the NHS’s growing use of private healthcare in a major speech today.
Private operators will receive an extra £2.5 billion a year in government funding under his new elective reform plan to address a waiting list for planned care on which 6.4 million people are waiting for 7.5m treatments.
This amounts to as many as a million extra appointments, scans and operations a year by the for-profit sector, with the official aim of patients no longer having to wait more than 18 weeks for non-urgent hospital care by spring 2029.
During his speech in Surrey, the prime minister acknowledged some people will “not like” expansion of the private sector in the NHS, but said: “To cut waiting times as dramatically as possible, our approach must be totally unburdened by dogma.”
Keep Our NHS Public co-chair Dr Tony O’Sullivan said: “The commitment of Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting to long-term contracts with the private sector threatens to permanently embed the profit-taking parasite in the NHS host, undermining the prospect of NHS recovery as a publicly provided universal service meeting the needs of the population.
“Starmer says he will ‘not let ideology stand in the way’ but it is their ideological choice that will stand in the way of sustainable NHS recovery.
“Safe and prompt community care will only be delivered through an urgent expansion of skilled staff.”
We Own It lead campaigner Johnbosco Nwogbo said: “Using the private sector to cut waiting lists was the centrepiece of the Conservative government’s Elective Recovery Plan in February 2022, but waiting lists kept going up.
“Starmer’s ‘new’ initiative looks suspiciously similar to the Conservatives’ failed plan.
“Hospitals are crumbling while the NHS is haemorrhaging at least £10m a week to private shareholder profits — money which could build a new operating theatre every week.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting meeting staff during a visit to London Ambulance Service headquarters in south London, December 9, 2024
Campaigners warn Labour’s ‘pro-business approach to data’ has ‘potential for further loss of public trust’ in the NHS
HEALTH Secretary Wes Streeting’s plans to sell GP data to the private sector “make no sense,” warned experts raising fresh privacy concerns yesterday.
Campaigners also warned Labour’s “pro-business approach to data” had the potential for further loss of public trust in the health service.
…
Mr Streeting in October said that data “is the future of the NHS” and Britain “could lead the world in medical research.”
He plans to create a “single access system” for information from GP surgeries, hospitals and other care settings after NHS England awarded a controversial £330 million contract to US spy tech giant Palantir in 2023 to develop a new platform.
Today Keep Our NHS Public co-chair Dr John Puntis said: “The Data Use and Access Bill currently going through Parliament illustrates Labour’s pro-business approach to data as a valuable resource, and highlights the potential for further loss of public trust.
“It aims to make data, including our personal heath data, widely available to public authorities and the private sector.
“The Secretary of State will be given power to erode safeguards over use of personal data for research.
“Labour intends to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses at the expense of safeguards for citizens.
“An alternative vision would include investment in a publicly owned national digital infrastructure aimed at storing and managing NHS data currently being processed through cloud computing services that are owned by large technology companies.
“There must be safeguards against the private sector gaining access to data for profit, and the public should be fully informed about the use of people’s health data and the right to protection and privacy.”
A spokesman for Momentum said: “Selling off patients’ data is no way to fix the NHS.
“We must fully renationalise our healthcare system and defend it from corporate interests, not welcome them.”
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
A woman named Mary holds a sign in support of Luigi Mangione outside the Criminal Court building in lower Manhattan as Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the United Healthcare CEO killing, waived extradition to New York on December 19, 2024. (Photo: Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images)
To honor Brian Thompson, and to ensure his death is not in vain, we can engage in the needed conversation about the extreme depravity of our healthcare system which his death revitalized.
Early this month Luigi Mangione, 26, University of Pennsylvania graduate, allegedly gunned down CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, 50. The public response has been varied, with many supporting Mangione. Some fear the positive regard of Mangione is indicative of a shift into a new era where violence is glorified and humanity is lost. As a sociology professor who teaches Poverty, Wealth, and Privilege, I disagree. This failure of subsets of the public to broadly denounce the actions of Mangione does not herald a cultural shift in appreciation of violence.
Instead this unusual display of class consciousness reflects two things. First, the reaction is due to the shift in who bore the cost of violence. Class under-resourced; Black, Indigenous, Latinx and people of color; women; and queer and trans people are the normal recipients of societal violence. Wealthy, cishet, white men in positions of power are not. Wealthy, white communities are conditioned to expect protection, and the revocation of that sheltering is rare.
Second, the working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. The ruling class profits from our blood, sweat, and tears. And yet, when one of the elite passes, they want us to give them more. They ask us to give them our love. Yet, they remain calloused to our pain and ignore our pleas for fairness.
We, as a community, might ask, how are the elite and their apologists not appalled by a harm-rich system that normalizes the idea that humans are only as valuable as their economic worth?
Recently, a magician performed at a kid’s birthday party. Magic tricks work through deception. A magician distracts the audience to hide what else they are doing. Similar dynamics play out in our public life. The wealth gap continues to grow, yet we voted in a billionaire to be president. The public is shamed for failing to appropriately sympathize with Brian Thompson and his family, yet everyday targeted attacks and systemic neglect accumulate to harm and render disposable historically and strategically marginalized communities, such as class under-resourced, BIPOC, women, and trans and queer people.
Let us stop this charade. Our healthcare system is not pro-health. The World Health Organization (WHO) names universal healthcare as a worldwide goal. The United States has not complied. Most Americans are insured through private companies. Many Americans struggle to pay for healthcare, they postpone receiving care, and are in medical debt. The healthcare system has practices, such as using AI to deny a high number of healthcare claims, which put profits over people. There is something deeply inhumane and harmful about this disregard for health in a healthcare system. It may not be illegal, but it is savage.
The elite and their apologists ask, “How could they not be appalled by Thompson’s murder?” Instead we, as a community, might ask, how are the elite and their apologists not appalled by a harm-rich system that normalizes the idea that humans are only as valuable as their economic worth? Decades ago, Larry Summers, currently on the board of directors of OpenAI, famously wrote that people who produce less are more expendable. This classist ideology pervades our healthcare system.
To honor Brian Thompson, and to ensure his death is not in vain, we can engage in the needed conversation about the extreme depravity of our healthcare system which his death revitalized. A path forward that reforms a calloused healthcare system can provide benefits to all of us. Those among us who deeply mourn Brian’s death can take solace that it can impart a legacy of positive, sustainable, and overdue social change. Those among us who view Mangione’s action as predictable, if not understandable, can appreciate the same reform.
To be sure, there are people who claim that human fallibility is a predestined curse that we cannot overcome, that we are born sinners and that we cannot do better than prioritize greed over care of each other, even within our healthcare system. There will be those of us who feel that disproportionate wealth is a triumph and that our healthcare should reflect the position we hold in our socioeconomic system. However, 73 countries have universal healthcare, including China, Russia, Mexico and Canada. Us Americans are also worthy.
Wealthy and powerful people are the most protected against societal harms, and they also have disproportionate control over them. We need the CEOs, billionaires, and other power elites to do better. The system does not have a great way to hold those in charge accountable for bad behavior. Can they figure out a way to hold themselves accountable? Can they reorganize to prioritize care, a virtue, over greed, a vice, in our healthcare system? If they are immune to this self-correcting recovery, we need to organize around collective action, such as voting, for example for single-payer healthcare, because our lives depend on it. We don’t want anyone dying in the street. We also don’t want anyone dying or in pain due to a broken so-called healthcare system.
Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 12/6/24) “can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.”
The early morning murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met on social media with a “torrent of hate” for health insurance executives (New York Times, 12/5/24). Memes mocking the insurance companies and their callous disregard for human life abound on various platforms (AFP, 12/6/24).
Internet users are declaring that the man police believe to be the shooter, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, is certifiably hot (Rolling Stone, 12/9/24; KFOX, 12/10/24). A lookalike contest for the shooter was held in lower Manhattan (New York Times, 12/7/24).
If so many people are unsympathetic at best in response to such a killing, that might be a reason to revisit why health insurance companies are so loathed. The rage “was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum, and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters,” the New YorkTimes (12/6/24) noted. Mangione was reportedly found with an anti-insurance manifesto that stated “these parasites had it coming” (Newsweek, 12/9/24), echoing a resentment largely felt by a lot of Americans, and targeted fury at UnitedHealthcare specifically.
UnitedHealthcare has always stood out for exceptionally high rate of claims denial generally in the industry (Boston Globe, 12/5/24; Forbes, 12/5/24). For example, a Senate committee found that “UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization denial rate for post-acute care jumped from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022” (WNYW, 12/7/24).
The Times (12/5/24) reported that the Senate committee found that “three major companies—UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna—were intentionally denying claims” related to falls and strokes in order to boost profits. UnitedHealthcare “denied requests for such nursing stays three times more often than it did for other services.”
Increasing dissatisfaction
The perception of the quality of US healthcare has been on the decline since 2012 (Gallup, 12/6/24).
On top of that, Americans generally believe their insurance-centered system is a mess. Gallup (12/6/24) reported that “Americans’ positive rating of the quality of healthcare in the US is now at its lowest point in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001.”
It continued:
The current 44% of US adults who say the quality of healthcare is excellent (11%) or good (33%) is down by a total of 10 percentage points since 2020 after steadily eroding each year. Between 2001 and 2020, majorities ranging from 52% to 62% rated US healthcare quality positively; now, 54% say it is only fair (38%) or poor (16%).
As has been the case throughout the 24-year trend, Americans rate healthcare coverage in the US even more negatively than they rate quality. Just 28% say coverage is excellent or good, four points lower than the average since 2001 and well below the 41% high point in 2012.
Most Americans are unsatisfied with the healthcare system, say the health insurance system is confusing and opaque, and many have skipped or delayed care because of a bad experience or the lack of timely appointments. A small, but not insignificant number, of Americans believe they have had a negative health outcome as result of their experiences within the healthcare system.
When this inefficient system doesn’t literally kill Americans, it can still kill them financially. “Almost a third of all working adults in the United States are carrying some kind of medical debt—that’s about 15% of all US households,” Marketplace (3/27/24) reported. It added: “This debt is also the leading cause of bankruptcies in the country.”
Many news outlets’ pontificators, however, were incensed that anyone would voice frustration with health insurance when an industry CEO has fallen.
‘Not the time to offer criticism’
After Brian Thompson’s killing, the New York Post (12/5/24) condemned those on social media who “swooned over his killer, speculated on his motives, and wondered if Timothée Chalamet would play him in the movie.”
Responding to the memes and the jokes, many of which were more about the unjust health insurance system than support for vigilante murder, the New York Post editorial board (12/5/24) asked:
Do the jokes point to a society that has become so desensitized by the coarseness of online discussion, so disassociated from kindness, that a baying mob cheers a man’s murder and cries out for more?
And upon Mangione’s arrest, the Post (12/9/24) complained that on social media, “tasteless trolls showered praise on the Ivy League grad.” The Post (12/11/24) also fretted about fake “Wanted” posters for insurance company executives that the paper considered a “a fear-mongering social media stunt to incite hysteria,” adding that the “murder has also spawned a stream of merchandise sympathetic towards the 26-year-old being sold by online retailers, forcing Amazon to pull them from its website.”
Fox News (12/6/24) quoted one of its own contributors, Joe Concha, saying, “I think this encapsulates the far left’s worldview: If you run a company that isn’t to their liking, you deserve to die.” The network (12/7/24) praised Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania for “tearing into” a New York article (12/7/24) that the outlet characterized as saying “resentment over denied insurance claims made…Thompson’s murder inevitable.”
The dismay was felt in other corners of right-wing media. At the Free Press (12/5/24), the brainchild of anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss, Kat Rosenfield wrote:
The people celebrating Brian Thompson’s murder by turning him into an avatar for everything wrong with the American healthcare system remind me of nothing so much as Hollywood screenwriters, cunningly manipulating an audience into cheering on unforgivable acts of fictional violence.
This is not the time to offer your criticisms of the health-insurance industry. And there is never a time to believe that corporate executives are, by their very nature, evil people who deserve to be killed. Yet that is what you’ll see if you go on social media right now and look at comments on news stories about this assassination.
Yet all of these outlets at the same time have run support for Daniel Penny, the man recently acquitted for killing a Black homeless man on the New York City subway (National Review, 6/17/23; Free Press, 10/20/24; New York Post, 12/4/24; Fox News, 12/6/24). These outlets likewise expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse after he gunned down Black Lives Matter protesters (National Review, 11/19/21; Free Press, 11/17/21; New York Post, 11/19/21; Fox News cited by Media Matters, 11/11/21), and for George Zimmerman when he shot Trayvon Martin (National Review, 6/22/20; New York Post, 7/15/13; Fox News, 7/18/12). In other words, it’s fine to defend vigilantes when they kill unarmed Black people or anti-racist activists, but when a CEO’s life is taken, we must solemnly stay silent on the reasons why such a person might be targeted or why bystanders might not be crying.
Piers Morgan (New York Post, 12/10/24) made this clear when he said “I cheered when I heard” Penny’s acquittal, and felt “shocked and saddened when I saw the footage” of the Thompson shooting. “Those two reactions would surely be the correct and appropriate ones for anyone with an ounce of fairness and humanity in their heart,” he said—because Thompson was “a non-violent, non-threatening, non-criminal man in the street,” whereas Penny’s victim was “a dangerous, mentally ill, homeless man.”
Blame it on Medicare
The Wall Street Journal (12/6/24) made the absurd claim that a medical system based on private insurance is better than any other kind of healthcare system.
It was the Wall Street Journal, the more erudite of Murdoch’s media properties, that really addressed the question of why people might hate health insurance companies. The anger was misdirected, the editorial board (12/6/24) said. Rather, we should look to federally funded healthcare if we want to get mad: “Medicare and Medicaid, two government programs, cover about 36% of Americans,” the paper observed; because they “pay doctors and hospitals below the cost of providing care…many providers won’t see Medicaid patients, resulting in delayed care.”
It’s an odd argument, given that people who receive Medicaid report being happier with their health insurance than people who get it through their employers or pay for it themselves—and people with Medicare are the happiest of all (KFF, 6/15/23). If the federal programs are underpaying healthcare providers, the obvious solution would be to increase funding for them—an initiative the Journal would be unlikely to support.
The board (Journal, 10/10/24) later dismissed critiques of the health insurance industry and passed off Mangione as a “disturbed individual” radicalized by the Internet and said it is “a dreadful sign of the times that Mr. Mangione is being celebrated.”
Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (12/8/24) followed up by placing the blame on the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”). “Having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior,” she wrote, but does “cause them to use more care.” The situation, she said, “has gotten worse since Obamacare expanded eligibility” for Medicaid. This portrait of US patients overusing healthcare like sweet-toothed children let loose in a candy store is belied by (among other things) the fact that Americans live 4.7 fewer years than the average of comparable countries (KFF, 1/30/24).
The Journal editorial went on to complain that “some providers prescribe treatments and tests that may be medically unnecessary,” and so “insurers have tried to clamp down on such abuse by requiring prior authorization.” While this “can result in delayed care that is medically necessary…it’s also how insurers control costs.”
In reality, doctors are complaining that insurance bureaucrats are impeding their ability to deliver needed healthcare because of this cost-slashing system (Forbes, 3/13/23). The American Medical Association found “94% of doctors say prior authorization leads to delays in patient care” (Chief Medical Executive, 3/14/23); “one in three doctors (33%) say prior authorization has led to serious adverse events with their patients.”
Journal editorialists appear to believe that doctors are jauntily giving away expensive blood pressure medicine and signing up patients for brain surgery for no particular reason, and the only thing that can stop this carnival of care is some bureaucrat who is trained to say “no.” The reality is that the private insurance system “saves insurance companies money by reflexively denying medical care that has been determined necessary by a physician,” as pediatrician William E. Bennett Jr. (Washington Post, 10/22/19) wrote. This is why people are so unsympathetic to Thompson, who was paid an estimated $10 million annually for imposing medical austerity on patients and providers (PBS, 12/7/24).
Pity the insurance giants
The Washington Post (12/7/24) criticized those who tried to use Thompson’s killing “as an occasion for policy debate about claim denial rates by health insurance companies.” (Note that both the Post and the Wall Street Journal used the same photo of flags at half-mast.)
Right-wing media weren’t the only engaging in scolding. At the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post, the editorial board (12/7/24) criticized those “who excuse or celebrate the killing,” as well as those “who do not countenance the killing itself” but “have nevertheless tried to treat it as an occasion for policy debate about claim denial rates by health insurance companies, an admittedly legitimate issue.” The Post added that debate was “fine in principle, but we’re skeptical that this particular moment lends itself to nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry.”
The editors nevertheless spent a lengthy paragraph explaining to readers that “controlling healthcare costs requires difficult trade-offs,” and that “even the most generous state-run health systems in other countries also have to face” these trade-offs. The editorial attempted to summon sympathy for
insurers, whose profits are capped by federal law, [and] must contend with consumer demand for ready access to high-priced specialists and prescription drugs—and, at the same time, premiums low enough that people can afford coverage.
Note that insurance company profits are “capped” by requiring them to spend at least 80% of premiums on claims, a percentage known as their loss ratio—but those claims can be paid to providers that are owned by the insurers themselves, “a loophole that makes loss ratio requirements meaningless” (Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, 7/16/21). United Healthcare has been particularly aggressive at this, which is part of the reason its “capped” profits soared to $22.4 billion in 2023.
As for the Post’s assertion that insurance providers should keep “premiums low enough that people can afford coverage,” KFF (10/9/24) found that “Family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 7% this year to reach an average of $25,572 annually, marking the “second year in a row that premiums are up 7%.” The Center for American Progress (11/29/22) found that employer sponsored insurance “premiums have risen above the rate of inflation and have outpaced wage growth” over the course of a decade. “Escalating grocery bills and car prices have cooled, but price relief for Americans does not extend to health care,” USA Today (10/9/24) reported.
The Post added that all this talk about how Americans are being tortured by the insurance system should wait until next year, “when Congress is to consider whether to keep temporary Obamacare enhancements that have boosted enrollment.”
It is easy to see the material interests of the Washington Post‘s owner at work. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon does not run a health insurance company, but it is fully entrenched in the for-profit medical system. It offers a health insurance marketplace through AmazonFlex, acquired the healthcare provider One Medical last year (NPR, 11/12/23; Forbes, 4/5/24), and offers a pharmacy and other health services.
As one of the world’s richest people, Bezos might have another reason to be worried about people cheering on the murder of CEOs: Amazon is often hated for its monopoly-like grip on online retail (FTC, 9/26/23), as well as charges of price-gouging (Seattle Times, 8/14/24) and union-busting (Guardian, 4/3/24).
‘Last or near last’
The failure of the US healthcare system in one chart: life expectancy plotted against healthcare spending.
The Washington Post‘s line about the comparable ills of “generous state-run health systems” echoed a similar argument from the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial, which concluded:
Government healthcare is a recipe for more care delays and denials. Witness the fiasco in the United Kingdom, where the Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment. To adapt a famous Winston Churchill phrase, private insurance is the worst form of healthcare, except for all others.
The statement that the British or European health systems are worse for people than the US private insurer–dominated system is simply false. Just months ago, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the United States
ranks as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare, including preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.
The US “ranked last or near last in every category except one,” precisely because
the complex labyrinth of hospital bills, insurance disputes and out-of-pocket requirements that patients and doctors are forced to navigate put the US second to last in administrative efficiency.
The Commonwealth Fund (CNN, 1/31/23) also found that
the United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, but still has the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases.
Healthcare providers in Mexico and Costa Rica are huge draws for Americans in need of care who can’t make it through America’s Kafkaesque system (NPR, 3/8/23). Spain and Portugal are attracting American retirees, and good low-cost health care is one incentive (Travel + Leisure, 6/20/24).
Retreat to the castle
Apparently the CEOs that Fox News (11/13/24) is so concerned about don’t qualify as “professional elites.”
While the Washington Post’s position clearly falls in line with its material allegiance to a system where its owner sits at the apex, the positions from Murdoch are more interesting. As the Democratic Party has lost support among the working class (NPR, 11/14/24; USA Today, 11/30/24), Murdoch’s outlets have touted Donald Trump and the Republican Party as alternatives for working-class voters.
Murdoch and other purveyors of Republican propaganda have promoted the idea that Democrats serve only financial elites and Hollywood producers, and that protectionist policies under Trump will help US workers (New York Post, 7/16/24; Fox News, 11/13/24). Republicans were able to woo voters by complaining about the high price of gasoline and groceries under the Biden administration (CNBC, 8/7/24).
Now Murdoch outlets are fully retreating into their elite castle and telling the rabble to stop complaining about the lack of access to healthcare. The Republicans and their news outlets have worked hard to recharacterize themselves as something more populist, but the Thompson killing has brought back the old narrative that they are, proudly, the champions of the 1 Percent.
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Protest against privatization of the NHS in the UK, February 25, 2023. (Photo: We Own It)
The UK Labour government is considering increasing the role of private healthcare providers, weakening NHS capacities
The Labour Party is considering a major expansion of the private sector’s involvement in the National Health Service (NHS) as it attempts to reduce waiting lists in the United Kingdom. Recently, the Independent Healthcare Providers Network (IHPN) wrote to Keir Starmer’s government, stating that private providers are ready to spend £1 billion to accommodate more NHS patients—if the government guarantees them long-term work.
While the offer has been welcomed by officials from the Department of Health, health activists have raised alarms over the plan. The We Own It campaign warned that a resurgence of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) policy, as essentially proposed by the private sector, would lead to higher debt, staffing shortages, and diminished NHS training capacities.
This wouldn’t be the first time private capital has been welcomed by a Labour administration. When Tony Blair was Prime Minister, PFI entrusted the private sector with financing the construction of hospitals to fill gaps in the NHS network. The NHS would then pay back the costs of building such infrastructure—with interest—over the course of 25 years or more, eventually becoming the owner.
However, earlier reports indicated that while the NHS gained £13 billion in assets through PFI, it also ended up with £80 billion in debt. This meant that until at least 2022, some NHS trusts spent more on servicing debt to the private sector than on medical supplies.
There is no indication that the current government would introduce stronger safeguards when implementing a new phase of the initiative, dubbed PFI 2.0. If anything, the situation might worsen. While the previous round of PFI left some infrastructure for the public sector, PFI 2.0 foresees nothing of the sort. The additional capacities would be entirely private, with the only public involvement being the money paid to them.
“PFI 2.0 would not only drastically expand private provision in the health service, it will also dramatically increase how much is sucked out of the NHS in profits,” We Own It suggested in its analysis. Currently, private companies siphon £10 million weekly from the NHS. Guaranteeing even more private contracts would add to that burden, leaving fewer funds to invest in the NHS’s own capacities.
Labour fails to grasp importance of publicly-owned NHS
According to a recent inquiry, these capacities are in dire need of strengthening, as health activists have claimed for decades. The inquiry indicated that years of austerity have left a deep mark on the NHS, and it was this—not staff inefficiency—that led to the crisis. Unfortunately, the inquiry failed to underline the importance of breaking ties with the private sector and keeping the NHS publicly-owned, according to the group Keep Our NHS Public.
Even if it did, it is highly likely that Health Secretary Wes Streeting would not understand the importance of such a strategy. Speaking at a party conference in September, Streeting expressed enthusiasm about “reform,” a code word used by governments for “anything but public investment in public capacities.”
“Reform or die. We choose reform,” the Health Secretary said. His approach has left activists understandably worried that the government is sticking to a vague health reform agenda instead of making material commitments to protect the NHS.
Rather than pursuing a shift from “analog to digital,” Keep Our NHS Public argued, the government should pledge to move away from underfunding, fragmentation, and outsourcing. As health workers and their trade unions have raised multiple times, a true strategy to protect the NHS must also include a commitment to improving working conditions and ensuring fair salaries.
If the private sector’s role is expanded, this would not be a realistic option. “The private sector does not have its own staff,” We Own It warned. “They steal staff, trained at huge public expense, from the NHS.”
Further involvement of the private sector would also reduce the NHS’s capacity to train new staff, the group stated. The procedures usually handled by the private sector are often critical for the hands-on experience needed by medical trainees. With fewer procedures of this kind being performed in NHS hospitals, these learning opportunities would disappear, condemning new generations of health workers to lower-quality education and undermine patient care.
“If PFI 1.0 was one of the nails in the coffin of the NHS as we know it, PFI 2.0 is the true end of our NHS as a public service that works for patients, not profit,” We Own It warned.
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
