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Two more bankers join the NHS England board to determine Healthcare changes America's United Health now have access to patient medical records Today, it has been announced that the hold on Healthcare in England by bankers, big business leaders and yes, CEO of Compare the Market, has been made ever tighter, as part of the preparation for healthcare insurance companies to be embedded into the NHS in England.
Together with a Chairperson with NO Medical background, but again a finance background, Richard Meddings and one of NHSE’s two deputy chairs, Wol Kolade, who is the managing partner and head at private equity firm Livingbridge; it is clear the Government wants the NHS to be run purely on business terms! To this end, Kolade last month he was reported as having questioned the NHS’s funding model and suggesting its budget cannot continue growing at the pace of recent years. An opinion expressly stated by Labour's Wess Streeting as previously reported by this website. With our personal medical records now being made available to the US major healthcare insurance company, United Health, as a result of their acquisition of EMIS and Optum agreed and authorised by the Competition and Mergers Authority; it is clearer than ever, that the NHS in England is being prepared for full privatisation and for control by American healthcare insurance companies! United Health are now running numerous GP practices across England - 30 in London alone with a further 60 outside of London. Every time you order repeat prescriptions via the on-line EMIS system aka Patient Access, your medical records are at risk of being accessed by the parent company of this service, America's United Health. Furthermore, the website makes claims that are not true. E.G. it claims that everyone can access their GP Practice to book on-line appointments, video calls and telephone consultations, with no mention of face to face appointments. The reality is that NOT ALL GP practices are accessible, and have signed up to the system. Despite this NHS England has given them all GP Practice details. For those not signed up, the patient trying to access their practice, is then advised of the details of the 'Private Healthcare services' in your area and suggest that you use these services instead! Patient Access website is promoting private healthcare services, and in turn will be able to forward your personal medical records it has access to, to those companies! Patient's medical data is central to this Government's healthcare strategy, as it is in the US, because without it Healthcare cannot be controlled, minimised and denied to patients; in order to maximise profit!
This happens to be one of biggest sources for NHS England to harvest private medical records and pass it on to the likes of Palintir and United Health for data analysis and capture. As in the US system, NHS England wants to be able to identify the costliest patients in terms of treatment and be able to deny access to NHS Hospitals and force the individuals to private healthcare sector for which they will need healthcare insurance! In the US system, Hospitals are controlled by businesses and insurance companies and denial of healthcare ia key tool in their armour of maximising profits. Further, they are all employing lawyers because of the risk of litigation because of their failure to save lives as a result of their aim to maximise profit. Now we are already seeing this to be the case in the NHS in England with increasing out of court settlements costing the NHS millions as nearly 130,000 patients died last year as a result of denial of healthcare by being stuck in ambulances, on trolleys in corridors, and bad diagnosis. Furthermore, a quango of the NHS England quango, called NHS Resolve whose aim is to deny claims of medical mal-practice or negligence has now stated that in the case of East Kent baby mortality scandal that: ".... families must prove causation and a breach of duty of care before any compensation can be made. This stipulation has been made even in cases where the inquiry found different treatment would have been reasonably expected to make a difference to the outcome." This attitude is exactly that of the US healthcare system and will mean that protracted and extremely stressful investigations will have to take place, with cover-ups being the norm as lawyers will be used to create as much riction as possiobel in order to wear patient's families down and to minimies, if any, compensation payments.
Such information is general knowledge within the NHS defence community in England, and as stated to the Save Liverpool Women's Hospital Campaign on 7th October 2023 by Greg Dropkin of Keep Our NHS Public, the situation is worsening day by day: "The NHS is being privatised. To illustrate how, I’ll focus on two companies: Optum and EMIS Health. The fact is that US healthcare insurance companies are crooks! Exaggerated claim? Not at all: United Health has been fined over $1.1 billion for 374 violations of US laws. Optum paid Ohio $15m for overcharging the Workers Compensation Board for generic drugs. California and Arkansas are suing Optum and other Pharmacy Benefit Managers and pharmaceutical companies for wildly inflating the price of insulin. Turning back to Greg Dropkin's speech: " Here in England, Optum has contracts with at least 19 Integrated Care Boards, and EMIS, formerly Egton Medical, has 30. Cheshire and Merseyside ICB pays Optum for prescribing software, and EMIS for primary care hardware and software. EMIS manages patient electronic records in GP surgeries, community and hospital pharmacies. The merger means United Health subsidiaries will be active all across England, including in medicines management. The US parent could also gain information derived from patients’ confidential medical records. Optum and EMIS are accredited under an NHS England scheme to fast-track firms to develop integrated care. Contracts can be dished out to pre-approved companies. Optum’s accreditations include ‘sharing structured medications data for uses such as population health management, medications reconciliation, and decision support’. That’s despite Optum being sued for rigging the price of insulin, and overcharging for generic drugs."
"Meanwhile, the notorious management consultancy PwC with a string of fines for accounting fraud, advises Cheshire & Merseyside on how and what to cut. In their first year, Integrated Care Boards spent at least £6.4bn on private companies. NHS Trusts funded by ICBs have their own private contracts. In our region, around 27% of the ICB budget ends up with private firms, either directly or via the Trusts. North East and South East London are even worse." Greg Dropkin from Keep Our NHS Public. The history of how got here, begins with Tony Blair's Governments, and carried on by the Tories and Liberals: "Back in 2014, the Coalition Government appointed Simon Stevens as NHS England Chief Executive. With no mandate from Parliament, NHS England introduced Accountable Care Systems based on a US funding model promoted by health insurance firms and consultancies including United Health and PwC. In 2018 it rebranded them as Integrated Care Systems." said Greg. He continued with his explanation by saying: "Before Stevens was appointed to run the NHS, he was president of United Health Europe, CEO of its $30 billion Medicare business, and president of its global health businesses. Before working for United Health, he advised Blair. We all want the end of this vicious Tory government. But where is Labour? From Thatcher onwards, all governments have damaged the NHS. Most PFI hospital schemes, including the Royal Liverpool, were signed off under Labour. Blair’s government changed the rules on ownership of GP surgeries, enabling United Health and later Centene to take them over. Independent Sector Treatment Centres were paid even if no treatment was given. Some clinical services went out to tender." But it was not just Blair's government that started the cut-back of NHS budgets: "When the banks collapsed in 2008, Gordon Brown asked the US management consultancy McKinsey how to cut NHS spending. They said massive efficiency savings, dropping certain NHS treatments, and moving services out of hospital could save £15-20 billion per year. When Labour enacted their plan, the NHS funding crisis began." But whilst Labour disowned Blair for invading Iraq, they have never repudiated what Blair, Brown, Milburn, Reid, and Hewitt did to the NHS. Unlike when Corbyn was leader, Labour now embraces the current fragmented and part-privatised NHS, and vows to an 'open door' policy towards private healthcare sector and the use of 'digital gimmickry' to deter patients from attending GPs pr A%E.
There is now a disaster, and the total collapse of anything purporting to be a 'national healthcare service' as Labour's Wess Streeting is planning further cost cutting of the NHS England budgets and, having taken funding from private health sector players, is bound to complete his aims to 'turn the NHS upside down' when he re-structures it into a minimum service using the private sector for everything. Only the full repeal of the Health and Care Act, and the NHS restored as a national health service., will save what was the best healthcare system in the world before Labour and Tory politicians destroyed it. To return to Greg Dropkin's words to the Save Our Liverpool Campaign rally last October: "We want comprehensive, universal healthcare, publicly provided, publicly accountable, fully funded through progressive taxation, free at the point of need, with decisions on treatment taken on clinical grounds without regard to ability to pay. That’s what we want, but whether we get it depends entirely on whether patients, health workers and trade unions stand up to fight for it." Source: Keep Our NHS Public / HSJ / The Guardian / Everydoctor / Unionsafety /The Telegraph See also: New Report Shows Over 13,000 NHS Patients Died Waiting For Treatment In 2023 NHS England Appoints Business Leaders To The Board That Runs The NHS NHS Abolition/Privatisation News Archive
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The two with private finance sector backgrounds have been appointed as NHS England associate non-executive directors - Suresh Viswanathan, chief operating officer at Nationwide Building Society and Tanuj Kapilashrami, chief strategy and talent officer at Standard Chartered Bank.
In 2022, the Health and Care Act legalised what NHS England had already done. Integrated Care Systems (US Accountable Care Organisation by another name) have their own budgets, set using a Payment Scheme which can vary for different areas, providers, or types of patients. Private companies are consulted on the details. The national health service is broken into 42 pieces. By destroying the national NHS economy, this could threaten national pay, terms and conditions, or staffing levels.
But the crooks are not just in American healthcare, but also management company Price, Waterhouse, Cooper are a notorious British company fined for a string of accountancy fraud offences and are actively involved in advising ICBs on how to cut cost by merging healthcare services, privatising services and hospitals and by cutting bed capacity within the NHS in England. 