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    Dr. Bob Gill: Sicko UK 📂 Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on July 14, 2021, 8:09 am

    July 14, 2021

    (quote)
    In February 2020, with the country in the grip of the pandemic, the government
    published a white paper ahead of legislation on the future reform of the NHS. To
    those who read it carefully, and read between the lines, the Health and Care
    Bill would turn the NHS into a cash cow for private corporations.

    The pre-pandemic NHS was already on its knees after a decade of de-funding. Some
    17,000 beds were cut and there were chronic staff shortages with vacancies for
    10,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses. Yet Johnson's government persists with its
    privatization policy objectives.

    ...

    The marketized NHS with its bloated administrative and managerial bureaucracy
    (consuming about 10 percent of the total NHS budget according to 2005 estimates)
    has continued to expand. The 2012 Health and Social Care Act converted the NHS
    internal market into a fully compulsory external market with all services up for
    grabs by the private sector.

    Section 75 of the act compelled open competitive tendering of all NHS
    services. Behind the NHS logo, private companies have expanded in the provision
    of services such as district nursing, community pediatrics, sexual health,
    elective surgery, audiology and diagnostic imaging.

    Primary care was parceled up into Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG), fronted
    by entrepreneurial general practitioners. The actual purchasing, contracting and
    outsourcing, of services and control of financial flows performed by
    Commissioning Support Units (now Lead Provider Framework) made up of private
    corporations including Optum (U.K. subsidiary of UnitedHealth, the world's
    largest private health insurance conglomerate) the big four accountancy firms
    (KPMG, PWC, EY, Deloittes) embedded in NHS back-room financial and
    organizational structures.

    Shrinking Capacity
    The result of the 2012 Act has been to shrink NHS capacity by 17,000 NHS beds,
    fragment provision of services with outsourcing of clinical care and entrench
    the power of private corporations in controlling NHS budgets, supervised by
    Simon Stevens since 2014, having returned to the NHS after 10 years at
    UnitedHealth of which three years were spent as as chief executive of
    UnitedHealth Medicare.

    ...

    The bill will create new legal entities, public-private partnerships known as
    Integrated Care Systems (ICS). The 42 ICS NHS bodies across England will control
    fixed tax-funded budgets for 1-to-2 million people from which they will be able
    to make profit. ICS boards will be dominated by the same private corporations
    currently providing outsourced services and performing commissioning function.

    Corporate profits are maximized by employing the fewest and cheapest healthcare
    staff through down-skilling and task shifting as seen in private health systems
    across the world. Additional downward pressure on staff wages and an end to
    national pay bargaining will reduce overhead costs.

    Repeal of section 75 of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act will end open
    competitive tendering, removing the legal obstacle for a private sector monopoly
    within the NHS. UnitedHealth/Optum are uniquely well placed to gain control of
    ICS budgets, with their personnel appointed to key NHS positions (not least
    Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England since 2014), importation of
    managed care software and protocols and upwards of £17 million in payments to
    Optum for training NHS and local council leaders.

    Optum software and data analytics will form the core mechanism for the denial of
    care to potentially expensive patients. The ICS will have the power to decide
    which services are to be provided across the ICS. For example, fertility
    treatment, cataract extraction, or knee surgery could be removed for the entire
    ICS population as previously drawn up plans by management consultants McKinsey
    described as "low value" procedures. Optum's algorithms and ICS deadly postcode
    lottery will prioritize generating profit streams above patients' health.

    Legal safeguards to ensure patients are discharged home safely will be removed
    and replaced by a "discharge to assess" scheme enabling patient dumping
    notorious in America. Deregulating health professionals and introducing a new
    secretive patient safety body will assist the decline of clinical standards
    while concealing predictable consequences.

    Patients in their most vulnerable state will struggle to access overstretched
    NHS hospitals or primary care services, staffed by fewer and less qualified
    health personnel, providing lower qualify services as funding is siphoned away
    from healthcare delivery.
    (/quote)
    -- https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/14/sicko-uk/

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