All those “Freedom” lovers who think the NHS would be better if privatised should consider how open it is compared to private providers: the scope for public access to information about private NHS providers will be hugely curtailed under Coalition plans.

Fuck me – do these NuLab apparatchiks have no shame?

Don’t forget NHS plc was written in 2005.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyson_Pollock

I agree with Rupert Read who says;
“The NHS was incredible value for money and the envy of countries and experts from Moscow and Havana to Berlin and Washington. And I’ve started speaking in the past tense since, for now, the NHS is half-abolished. It is dying; or rather, being killed, because of the dogmatic neo-liberal belief of Brown et al that private solutions must trump public ones. It is on the way to becoming little more than a kite-mark for numerous outsourced profit-making operations”.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/2008/02/08/nhs-plc-by-allyson-pollock

Labour have already dug the hole – unsurprisingly Lansley is about to throw the body in?

@2 Don’t you know the rules? A new sheriff is in town. That means that whatever was done before to pave the way for the Tories, never happened. Voting records don’t matter. Labour’s privatisation doesn’t matter. Darling never said there would be £44bn worth of cuts. You have a shadow Treasury chief secretary criticising the culture of bankers’ greed and international finance.. which happened under her party’s watch and instruction. All is forgiven, just like that, because some other people with blue and yellow rosettes are now in power, doing pretty much the same thing.

No, they have no shame.

Yet again the Labour party are deliberately missing the point.

The real privatisation will come in 2014 when the newly “liberated” Foundation Trusts will be allowed to become “Community Interest Companies”. This will take hospitals out of public ownership. The White Paper is very clear about this, it says that it intends hospitals to be “employee-led social enterprises” this means there will be management buyouts.

Ask anyone if they want their local hospital to be taken out of public ownership and they will tell you an emphatic NO. This is a very clear campaign issue and Labour are ignoring it. Why?

Well Ed Miliband’s first ministerial role was as the “Minister for the Third Sector” and he was in charge of bringing in the odious laws to allow public services to be taken out of public ownership and into private hands as “social enterprises”. He is complicit in Lansley’s privatisation plans because Ed created the laws that Lansley will use.

If Ed Miliband is serious about making a break with the New Labour past then he should campaign to keep NHS hospitals publicly owned. He won’t, of course

@4 – when the Tories were in opposition and formulating this plan to allow co-operatives of employees to take over services the media went mad on how they were using socialist ideas.

However, no-one commented on the fact that the Tory policy explicitly mentioned that the co-operative would only have a 5 year contract. Then it would be open to competive tender against the full private sector. Even if performance was up and costs were down.

The Tory co-op plan is a way of bringing public owned services into a half-way house to the private sector. They just forgot to mention that bit.

If you are in favour of privatisation, fair enough. I don’t agree, but fair enough. But the now government can’t even be open about it. They avoid every question about what happens further down the line.

[5] 20 years ago it was claimed that the ‘internal market’ was the only way to stop Thatch from pushing for full blown privatisation of the NHS?
http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/internal-market-was-only-way-to-stop-thatcher-privatising-nhs/26572.article

But instead of dismantling Tory excesses NuLab chose to embrace them with the sort of enthusiasm that must have thrilled the iron-lady herself – THAT’s what sticks in the throat when the likes of Healey point the finger at Lansley?
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=4006626&sectioncode=25

Yes how the Germans, French, Swedes etc. must gaze at us with envy.

Such envy that for some mysterious reason they dare not copy us.

I wonder why not?

cjcjc:

Sigh,

This is all a bit too simplistic. Take a look at this:
http://tinyurl.com/33yawdb from this report: http://tinyurl.com/38fczhw by the Commonwealth Fund (An American organisation.)

The reasons why other countries have not directly copied the NHS are many and complex and are usually socialogical and cultural. Not because the NHS doesn’t work. It does. Not because the NHS is not cost-effective. It is.

Whilst I am sympathetic to the complaints above about how New-Labour approached the NHS, I think they miss the point. The reforms were a price worth paying for the excellent and effective service we now have and are not part of the same journey that Lansley wants to take us on. Maybe they help but we cannot afford to lose this argument, because the White Paper is fundementally different.

Is there room for improvement? Of course. Is Lansley’s White Paper a good thing? Not remotely.

For two reasons:
1. It will be very expensive, both in it’s set up and running.
2. It does open the door to privatisation.

Is there are argument for reversing the commisioner/supplier split in the health service? maybe. But the current system does work. For the vast majority of people very well.

Lansley must be stopped.

AFZ

The NHS is the most efficient comprehensive health system in the world – providing remarkably high levels of service for remarkably low proportions of GDP.

That doesn’t mean we can’t learn from other system – but pretending that the NHS doesn’t work is just as silly.

The problem that arrises with private ownership of NHS services is, as others have pointed out, that they are often less open to scrutiny, and they tend to use contracts to focus only on specifics and so do not provide comprehensive service.

Paying a private firm to provide 10,000 hip replacement operations may be plausible, paying a private firm to provide comprehensive care to an indeterminate number of people tends not to work so well – as seen in care home opperations.