Media
Labour's 'reforms' destroying the NHS
Published 01 November 2007
Tony Benn predicts a revolution in defence of the National Health Service but it may be too late to erect the barricades
Lying back in a hospital ward, the procedure done and successful, a cup of tea going down nicely with the last of the morphine, you are a spectator to the best. By the best, I mean a glimpse of society with none of the dogmatic histrionics of a media and political class determined to change the way we think. That is the worst. By the best I mean, unforgettably, the spectacle of the miners of Murton, County Durham, emerging from the mist of a cold March morning, with the women marching first, going back to the pit. No matter their defeat by superior forces, they were the best.
In a hospital ward, the best is more likely mundane, with people working routinely, listening, responding, reassuring. Their vocabulary is not corporate-speak. Their "productivity" is not a device of profit. Their commitment has no bottom line, and their camaraderie is like a presence; and you become part of it. The common thread is humanity and caring. How exotic that sounds. Turn on the ward's television and there is a weird other-world of "news", with famous dullards spinning the latest destruction of society.
There is the mad Blair calling for an attack on Iran and Ed Balls peddling his dodgy diplomas, and Gordon Brown, fresh from entertaining Rupert Murdoch and Alan Greenspan, announcing his "return of liberty" along with his latest "reforms" that are malignancies on the one institution that embodies liberty: the National Health Service. None of them has the slightest connection with the people running my ward. The divide in modern Britain is between a society represented by those who keep the NHS going, and its mutation epitomised by new Labour.
In Michael Moore's Sicko, Tony Benn predicts a revolution in Britain if the NHS is abolished. But the NHS is being destroyed by attrition, and if the latest "reforms" are not stopped, it will be too late to erect barricades. On 5 October, the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, approved a list of 14 companies that will advise on and take over the "commissioning" of NHS services. They will be given influence, if not eventually control, over which treatments patients receive and who provides them. They are assured multimillions in profits.
They include the US companies UnitedHealth, Aetna and Humana. These totalitarian organisations have been repeatedly fined for their notorious role in the American health-care system. Last year, UnitedHealth's chief executive, William McGuire, who was paid $125m a year, resigned following a share-option scandal. In September, the company agreed to pay out $20m in fines "for failures in processing claims and responding to patient complaints". Aetna has had to pay $120m in damages after a California jury found it guilty of "malice, oppression and fraud". In Sicko, a medical reviewer for Humana is shown testifying to Congress that she caused the death of a man by denying him care in order to save the company money. Every year, some 18,000 Americans die because they are denied health care or they cannot afford it.
These companies are new Labour's friends. Simon Stevens, Blair's former health policy adviser, is now a CEO at UnitedHealth. Julian Le Grand, writing in the Guardian as a distinguished professor, gives his learned approval to the "reforms" - he, too, was Blair's adviser.
In Manchester, other "reforms" are well on the way to destroying NHS services for the mentally ill. William Scott committed suicide after losing the support of an NHS worker who had cared for him for eight years. What all this means is that the NHS is being softened up for privatisation by stealth. This is the undeclared policy of the Brown government, whose rapacious actions abroad are mirrored at home. It was chancellor Brown who promoted the disastrous private finance initiative as a device to build new hospitals, while handing huge profits to favoured companies. As a result, NHS trusts are bled by £700m a year. This has caused a wholly unnecessary "financial crisis" that is the catch-22 rationale for allowing more profiteers to take over what was a Labour government's greatest achievement. Will we allow them to get away with it?
www.johnpilger.com
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