The Tories are finally destroying the NHS; it’s time to get angry
Inevitably — and despite all claims to the contrary — the Tories have plunged the National Health Service (NHS) into such a crisis of confidence and under-funding that the International Red Cross is calling existing conditions a ‘humanitarian crisis’. The Tory government has equally predictably countered with its usual evasions.
The Tories want to destroy the NHS. As the jewel in the increasingly tarnished crown of our welfare state and a stark reminder of a time when people expected the state to put its people first and transnational corporations second, the NHS is a poke in the eye of unregulated capitalism every day it survives.
The Tories want to hand over our health services to private providers. They have been doing this with less and stealth since 2010. Behind the ideological lies behind austerity and the attacks on health tourism and the completely false claims that they are continuing to fund the service, the aim is to end up with a health system based on private insurance.
They look to the US, of course, where private health provision is so successful that a serious illness can bankrupt a family and where healthcare costs per capita are more than double those in the UK. A recent report from WHO and the OECD ranked US health provision 11th in a table that saw the UK first.
You have to wonder, then, what drives the people who want to subvert this and make health provision more expensive, less accessible, and of poorer quality. These people are Tories, so the drive is profit and greed.
And, as always, we have a compliant BBC and other mainstream media that reports the stories but from the point of view of a failing health service.
Never is it mentioned that the Tories repeatedly promise to uphold the NHS while deliberately underfunding it.
Never is it mentioned that ministers involved in slicing off services to hand to private providers are financially connected to the private providers.
Never is it mentioned that once the private companies have cherry-picked the more lucrative services, it remains the NHS at present that picks up the pieces when things go wrong and the private hospitals can’t cope with emergencies.
As Danny Dorling put it in his 2014 book, Inequality And The 1%:
The 1% sees the NHS as a river of money coming from the government which can be partially diverted into private healthcare — an historically lucrative source of income for them. Meanwhile, private healthcare companies do not fund the education of their NHS-trained staff; they pick and choose the lucrative aspects of healthcare, and when necessary pas the buck back to the NHS.
The crisis of the ‘recent’ financial crash remains the cover for the ideologically driven attack on the welfare state that the free market neoliberals have long sought to wage. They will be happy only when every one of us is no longer a citizen but has been transformed fully into a customer of each different business that runs every aspect of our lives.
