Barracuda & NHS: Privatised? No! No! No!

Many of us who continue to love the NHS-Original watched the Panorama programme with intense interest. We saw Harley Street offering better and cheaper cardiac care. We saw Circle’s  Ali Parsadoust in an altruistic posture proclaiming that Circle is the only one that can save the NHS.

Then we saw the unholy gaming by one Hospital on one PCT/GP practice. Or did they?

I have always warned that if those clever people can collapse a complete banking system and they now come and “game” the NHS, what chance do we have.

As private companies offer free shares for GPs in the new market based healthcare system that will soon replace the current NHS, it is amazing that there remain doctors that will continue to point out the dark forces driving the current change.

The Cockroach Catcher has retired from the NHS, but there are other doctors who still work in it, and I respect how verbal some of them are against the initiatives that are currently underway to turn the NHS into an essentially private system without the safeguards of the new US system.

But hang on, no, the NHS will never be totally privatised.

The inspiration came from the natural world: good parasites do not kill their hard working hosts!!! Nor do predators kill the whole species. Keep some alive!!! Milk them forever!!!

Giant Barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda) ©2003 Am Ang Zhang 

As the US insurers found out, Government money is the best money to make and that is really tax payer’s money. The new NHS will be the private sector’s main source of income, as only 90,000 in the UK are covered by private insurance and often they are offered cash incentives to use the NHS.

It is therefore essential for the private health care companies that the NHS is around, at least in name, so that they can make money by providing a “better value and more competitive” service to the NHS!

Some parts of the NHS will have to remain too, as it is necessary for the private sector to dump the un-profitable patients: the chronic and the long term mentally ill, for example. (Right now, 25% of NHS psychiatric patients are treated by the private sector.  But why? Even in psychiatry, there are cherries to be picked.)

Finally, in order to keep the mortality figures low at competing private hospitals, they need to be able to rush some of their patients off to NHS hospitals at the critical moments!

In any case, they do not do dialysis and intensive care, do they?

Wine & Tea: NHS ---- Will it die?