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Delivery of diagnostic tests, scans, outpatient appointments, surgery and cancer treatment to be privatised The private sector currently receives £12.3bn a year of NHS funding for treating NHS patients
Despite TV News media promoting the Government's NHS privatisation plans, and falsely giving it legitimacy; those who know exactly what is happening to the NHS, including nurses, doctors, surgeons and GPs, are condemning the 'reforms' for what they are - the wholesale privatisation of NHS services and healthcare.
“Just as in the 2000s, the NHS could provide those million appointments and build sustainable capacity if funding was invested to reopen theatres, provide equipment, support more NHS GPs, community and hospital staff. That is value for money. Keir Starmer claims to set ‘ideology’ aside whilst choosing to invest in expensive long-term private sector contracts. Private ‘spare capacity’ relies on NHS staff and funding to resource their expansion. Keir Starmer’s ‘choice’ is to ignore the soaring profits enjoyed by the private sector operating on NHS patients for routine cataract surgery whilst NHS eye departments lose that funding and their staff are unable to treat many patients with other sight-threatening conditions in time. The private sector needs NHS funding to be diverted and NHS staff to reduce their NHS hours to staff ‘spare capacity’. Feeding the parasite undermines the health of the NHS host.” The damage to Ophthalmology within the NHS has already begun, with private companies undertaking routine cataract procedures, Diabetes eye testing and treatment being performed outside of the NHS, with patients being given sits of private practitioners to choice from locally.
Furthermore, when things go wrong, as they sometimes do, the patient then has to be seen at the local hospital Ophthalmology dept, and further remedial surgery and treatment is often necessary. This add further pressure on waiting lists and risks the eyesight of the patient. Given that the majority of existing private sector hospitals do not have emergency depts, and do not provide the aftercare, patients are then discharged immediately following surgery - usually to their homes and have then to be followed up by hospital out-patient appointments. All of this adds further pressure to funding the NHS, result in budget cuts and reduction of services, and aids the closing of hospitals by ICS - all as in the US model of healthcare denial in order to maximise profit for the private sector. What is Elective Healthcare? "Elective care covers a broad range of planned, non-emergency services, from diagnostic tests and scans to outpatient appointments, surgery and cancer treatment." says NHS England. This is the vast area of healthcare that the NHS provides, and is now effectively going to be privatised under Labour's reforms of the NHS. What is UK form of Healthcare Privatisation? The general public are confused as to just what healthcare privatisation is in the UK, and assume it is only privately provided if you have to pay on delivery, and often in advance. But in fact, private healthcare companies operating in the UK, have been given contracts to provide NHS healthcare services instead of the NHS, with the cost being paid for from the NHS Budget which if solely funded by taxes paid by the British people. This means NHS funding is being given to private healthcare companies, who charge on the principle of profit and not on that of prioritising patient care. This of course then reduces the amount in the NHS budget that is used to pay for NHS delivered services and impacts upon the quality of healthcare and treatments available on the NHS. Furthermore, this is done by stealth, and under the NHS logo, with patients not being told exactly which company is delivering their healthcare. But the reality is entirely different than that spun by Keir Starmer in his speech announcing the reforms to healthcare in England. All Governments have under funded the NHS deliberately in order to enable the incursion of private healthcare companies into the NHS, and with the eventual aim of re-designing healthcare in the UK to align with the US system of private health insurance delivery of healthcare based on the principle of making profit.
Deliberately choosing words to polarise public opinion and give a false narrative that this is all about patients, and not the private healthcare companies such as United Health and other US owned companies that have gifted funds to the PM and Sec of State for Health and Social Care amounting to over £193,000 in the case of Wes Streeting. Starmer said in his speech that he would not let critics of NHS privatisation stop him relying more heavily on the independent sector, because people’s health needs must come first. “When the waiting lists have ballooned to 7.5m, we will not let ideology or old ways of doing things stand in the way of getting people’s lives back on track. It would be a dereliction of duty not to use every available resource to get patients the care they so desperately need,” he said. In fact his dereliction of duty to private healthcare companies and interests that have funded him and Streeting and other Labour Party officials, would be the issues if he had not clearly promised to transfer huge numbers of patients care to the private sector! The private sector currently receives £12.3bn a year for treating NHS patients, according to last month’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) annual report - available from the Unionsafety E-Library by clicking on the image above right. Source: The Guardian / Keep Our NHS Public / DHSC See also: Government Makes Deal To Transfer NHS Services To Private Sector NHS: Power To Patients Hides Intended Expansion Of US Private Healthcare Sector NHS Privatisation News Archive
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The co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, Dr Tony O’Sullivan, told The Guardian newspaper that the private sector was a parasite that was damaging the health service and that it would lose out as a result of the deal because its own staff would provide most of the expansion of private care.
