Tag Archives: NHS

NHS privatisation consultants in attack on Obama health reforms

7:57pm Mon June 13th

A consultancy firm receiving millions of pounds in NHS privatisation contracts has seen its controversial research used in attempts to derail reforms designed to bring health cover to 32 million Americans.

McKinsey & Company rowed with the White House after releasing a study claiming that 30% of US employers are planning to stop health insurance for their workers as a result of Barack Obama’s reforms. However sources from within the company have indicated that their research was flawed.

As right wing commentators jumped on the report, declaring it a huge blow to the Affordable Care Act, the company refused official requests to release information on methodology, despite it contradicting the findings of a number of other studies.

Here is Fox News’ predictably hysterical reaction to McKinsey’s “research”:

The controversial company is also at the heart of health privatisation in the UK. Having already drawn up plans for £20bn cuts and 137,000 redundancies, dozens of commissioning consortia have now handed taxpayer contracts to McKinsey as responsibility for health procurement is shifted to GPs.

Alongside Mark Britnell, who remarked that the NHS would be “shown no mercy” on privatisation, McKinsey’s head of global health systems was recently invited to 10 Downing Street to advise David Cameron on Andrew Lansley’s stalled reforms.

With significant question marks over the legitimacy of their research in defending corporate vested interests in the US, should we now embed McKinsey at the heart of our own health system?

Did Nick Clegg calls Ed Miliband a “fucking bastard” during PMQs?

8:36pm Sat June 11th

20 comments

Kudos to the Predictable Paradox blog for exposing some potentially unparliamentary language during PMQs. Referencing the hitherto restrained use of private health providers under New Labour, Nick Clegg could be seen to lash out across the dispatch box as Ed Miliband took the government to task over the NHS this week.

To the untrained eye, the deputy prime minister appears to say:

“You were the ones who privatised it, you fucking bastard.”

Sat impotently alongside his political masters each Wednesday, the best Nick Clegg can come up with is the parliamentary equivalent of the naughty schoolboy’s refrain:

“But he started it, Miss!”

UPDATE: One commenter has suggested that Clegg may be saying “You’re the ones who gave the private sector a free pass.” Are there any lip readers out there (proper ones) who can confirm the wording?

Private providers pay £60,000+ for access to senior NHS management

3:16pm Fri June 3rd

5 comments

As the government attempt to get NHS privatisation up and running even before the Health and Social Care Bill is passed, private healthcare providers are paying upwards of £60,000 for access to government ministers and senior NHS management, including ”top table places” at a dinner with Andrew Lansley.

Networking packages for the NHS Confederation conference next month offer corporations the opportunity to ”engage with health sector leaders” for a pricetag of between £48,000 and £60,000. And in promotional documents which clearly move the programme into cash-for-access territory, the highest level of sponsorship, for which no fee is quoted, explicitly guarantees private providers quarterly briefings from policy staff and meetings with NHS directors:

“Become an event partner and benefit from … two meetings at your HQ with director-level NHS Confederation representatives”

To further facilitate lobbying of NHS management and Whitehall officials, companies are even provided with advance notice of event attendance lists and “post-event access to delegate contact information”. Companies in attendance include KPMG Health, whose chief claimed the NHS would be “shown no mercy” on privatisation, and care home company Castlebeck Group, currently at the centre of an abuse scandal which saw four of its staff arrested.

The fire sale of public healthcare has begun in earnest.

And while NHS services may remain “free at the point of use” it seems access to decision makers certainly is not.

Cameron health adviser: NHS to be “shown no mercy” in privatisation

11:23am Thu May 12th

64 comments

One of David Cameron’s most senior health advisers told a conference of health executives that the NHS will be privatised, advising representatives from healthcare companies of an impending goldrush in the wake of Andrew Lansley’s health reforms.

Mark Britnell was NHS director general for commissioning and system management before joining the private sector as global head of health at KPMG. He was recently appointed to a new panel of senior health policy experts by David Cameron, attending their first meeting last week.

According to the public relations industry monitoring site Spinwatch Britnell did not mince his words on privatisation when addressing a seminar called “Reform Revolution” at a conference for healthcare corporations:

“In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer.”

Delegates had been told the conference, run by $20 billion private equity firm Apax Partners, would cover ”business opportunities post global healthcare reform.” Britnell delivered the good, offering this deliciously off-message sound bite:

“The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

Despite their focus on health reform, Cameron’s new panel of advisers will not contribute to the announced process in which stakeholders can suggest ”improvements” to Andrew Lansley’s proposals.

As though we needed any more evidence that this “listening exercise” is a sham.

NHS managers “thrilled” by 1,011 dead people

12:29pm Sun May 1st

6 comments

While increasing numbers on the organ donation register are undoubtedly a good thing, perhaps NHS managers could have chosen a more sensitive formulation for this internal memo:

“We are thrilled to be able to announce this financial year for the first time ever, there were 1,011 deceased organ donors in the United Kingdom.”

The note memo then goes onto provide fodder for conspiracy nuts:

“Of course, these increases have not happened by chance, they are the result of concerted efforts by our dedicated team of specialist nurses.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Smith, you won’t feel a thing!”

Panicked letter from Tory doctor details rescue bid for NHS reforms

4:59pm Thu April 21st

5 comments

The former Conservative mayor of Kensington and Chelsea is leading a rescue strategy for Andrew Lansley’s health reforms. In a leaked email, NHS doctor Jonathan Munday told the heads of GP consortia that the political climate against reforms from which they stand to profit “is getting worse by the day”.

Dr. Munday, who lists “freemasonry” and “Conservative politics” as interests on his website, chairs the £80 million/year Victoria Commissioning Consortium. His memo outlines a strategy to defend NHS restructuring where doctors ”jointly write an open letter to Mr Cameron via the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail and the Today programme supporting the reforms”.

The most enlightening element of the leak is not the text of the letter to David Cameron but a preamble which never mentions patients care once, addressing instead the dynamics between competing “vested interests” in the medical establishment:

I am now getting seriously worried that the political pressure on Lansley is such that the government may abort GP commissioning entirely or, almost worse, may so water it down and constrain it that GP consortia will have the worst of all worlds: a lot of effort, political responsibility for any cuts but no ability to wrest initiatives or make needed reforms.

Having clarified where he stands on making “a lot of effort”, he continues:

I am especially worried that the government may leave Consortia, as at present, sub-committees of retained PCT Clusters. I feel that GP consortia, who have most to lose from the Press listening to vested interests in the rest of the medical establishment, must take some urgent action to take back the political initiative within the “pause” and to enable the government to proceed with the reforms with the maximum flexibility and independence for GP consortia.

Munday concludes by pleading (vainly) “I must please ask you to respect the privacy of this letter, whether you are in favour or not.”

It seems not all GPs share his zeal for the marketisation of the NHS.

The Andrew Lansley rap

9:45am Thu March 24th

3 comments

NxtGen, a Loughborough based MC has posted a X-rated critique of Tory Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s proposed NHS reforms. The more printable sections of the lyrics include the verse:

“Lansley’s white paper: ‘Liberating the NHS’
sets out a plan where we’ll become more like the U.S.
and care will be farmed out to private companies,
who will sell their service to the NHS via the GPs,
who will have more to do with service purchase arrangements
than anything to do with seeing their patients.”

Be warned: this one’s not for the prudish!

Interestingly, this video is partial shot in the Leicester West constituency of Labour Shadow Health Minister, Liz Kendall.

Wonder if she is behind one of the Lansley masks?

Sign David Cameron's petition to save the NHS from cuts

11:31am Wed February 23rd

110 comments

With the axe set to fall on more than 50,000 NHS jobs, no one can say Cameron doesn’t have a sense of humour. In addition to the airbrushed posters and now laughable claims that the Conservatives “will increase spending on the NHS every year so we can protect frontline services”, Dave also spent the end of 2009 plugging a petition to protect the NHS from spending cuts!

Citing consultancy on health reform commissioned by the previous Labour government, the petition (PDF download) claims:

[The report] said that one in ten NHS jobs should be cut — and many of them frontline staff like doctors and nurses. Labour would put 137,000 NHS jobs at risk — jeopardising frontline services.

So that’s 53,150 down and 83,850 to go!

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