It is amazing how the
few things we picked up from early childhood serve us well into our adult life.
©2012 Am Ang Zhang
This time
the child is called Polly.
Whatever convinced Shirley
Williams to U-turn, it was a shame that she put herself on the line in so bad a
cause: "I would not be standing here, and I would not have stuck with the
bill, if I believed for one moment it would undermine the NHS." But
virtually every royal college says it will.
Doctors will make
more money if they do not object to the HSCB!
There is no self-interest in the professions' opposition: GPs are supposed to
rule the roost in this bill. What they see clearly on legal scrutiny is that
competition and commercialisation will now drive the NHS, not collaboration.
In
the new world order of our NHS, private provider (AQP)for commercial reasons
need not let the public have access to information about their activities etc,
and even the doctors they provide.
Just look at one of the OOH, one doctor for 950,000
population! As they say, be very afraid.
Even
as we like our NHS as much as our woods: looks like private providers for
public services is in the PM's mind. Sometimes it is public (taxpayer) money
for private failures: catastrophic failures when it is someone's life.
Wait, most of the
time they are the same doctors so introducing competition is not going to
improve anything.
Under
the agreement, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (King's) has joined
GSTS Pathology, the joint venture between Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation
Trust (Guy's and St Thomas') and Serco GSTS Pathology has been awarded a
ten-year contract valued at around £300m, starting October 2010, as the
principal provider of pathology for King's. It is anticipated that the
agreement will result in incremental revenue to Serco over the term of the
King's contract of approximately £110m.
The other way is to
refer to Any Qualified Provider, the new NHS speak for Private Providers.
Better still if these are owned by the same organisations that own some of the
GP practices. Believe me, it is already happening and it will spread.
How could this be done?
Simple, NHS Foundation Hospitals will not stand a chance if they have to
continue with the expensive and unprofitable conditions or expensive dialysis
and Intensive Care that many private insurers will not touch. In the new world
order, they will fail and be closed or be bought by private companies. We have
the regulator called Monitor that will see to it.
Again it will not be
the politician’s fault: just bad management.
In 2009 the total value of the market for
PH(Private Healthcare) in the UK was
estimated at just over £5.8 billion. Private hospitals and clinics account for
the largest part of the overall PH market, generating an estimated £3.75
billion in revenue during 2009. Fees to surgeons, anaesthetists and physicians
generated an estimated £1.6 billion in 2009.
The total number of UK citizens
with Private Insurance is estimated to be around 90,000. It is not difficult to
work out what good value the NHS has always been.
The greatest threat to
the NHS is perversely that of its regulator and in turn it is a threat to our
democracy as the regulator is not elected and therefore not accountable to the
electorate.
“……Tom Clark our leader writer says the real
problem with the bill is the fact that the new regulator has a duty to promote
competition where appropriate. He points out that in a previous life as a
special adviser the regulator
used his powers to squeeze state bodies in order to open up the space for
private providers. It's why he is so against competition.”
We must not overlook the fact that Monitor is
headed by someone from McKinsey and my reading is that one way or another the
private providers are coming in.
I don’t care about my
hospital’s use of resources, I want to know if it is going to deal with my
particular problem on the day that it has to see me. We have a market with huge
barriers to both entry and exit, and little or no idea on how either can be
achieved. We have a regulator with little or no
ability to get involved and deal with systemic problems like under-provision or
to censure collusion.
In short, it’s a
shambles. This isn’t a marketplace, it’s a distorted opportunity for private
providers to make profits and undermine comprehensive public provision at the
same time – the very antithesis of a competitive environment. I fear for
the future of health services in the NHS.
The Department seems
to have been foolishly duped by commercial companies that promised
the sun, cost the earth, and delivered not much more than hot air. Damningly,
PAC's report states: “The Department could have avoided some of the pitfalls
and waste if they had consulted at the start of the process with health
professionals.”
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