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The pro-privatisation vultures are circling above our country's hospitals. The NHS is 'bankrupt' they say- so it needs radical reform i.e. privatisation.

I've written before about one of the pro-privatisation pressure groups 'Reform', and its director, Andrew Haldenby has a vicious piece of anti-NHS propaganda in today's Daily Telegraph.

Haldenby calls for more NHS patients to be treated privately. Apparently he has heard of "new companies that treat NHS patients twice as well as the rest of the service (measured by complication rates after operations) at 20 per cent lower cost. "

What Haldenby doesn't mention in his propaganda piece is the way private health companies have ripped off the NHS- and the British taxpayer- for £1bn for operations and treatments they have failed to carry out. More details at the Campaign For Public Ownership website.

So if we are serious in improving the financial health of the NHS, then the first step should be to abolish 'Independent Sector Treatment Centres' and end all NHS contact with profiteering private health companies.

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This column of mine appears in the Morning Star.

You can be fairly sure that when neoliberals tell us that such and such a "reform" will be good for us, they really mean that "reform" will be good for capital and not for the majority of the public.

The neoliberals said that selling off the railways would lead to better service and lower fares. They also said that privatising gas, electricity and water would reduce household bills. And now they would like us to believe that the establishment of polyclinics will improve health care.

Don't believe a word of it.

A 2008 King's Fund report said that polyclinics could pose "significant risks for patient care." It also found that "there is no evidence that larger GP practices deliver higher quality care than smaller ones and that "there is ... evidence that quality may be decreased in certain cases."

The report also warned that "a major centralisation of GP services into polyclinics would make it more difficult for patients to visit their GP, especially those living in rural areas."

In addition, a new study by Kent GP Dr Hendrik Beerstecher has found that average-sized GP surgeries are just as good as "super-surgeries" at providing extra services. He looked at 384 practices and found no difference between the range of extra services offered by standard surgeries and polyclinics.

"I am not sure why the government is pushing ahead with polyclinics. As the study shows, there is no evidence that they provide more services so why are we having them set up all across the country?" he asked.

Why indeed? The answer to Dr Beerstecher's question is that polyclinics make it easier for the government to further its objective of privatising the NHS by stealth.

Big corporations will be able to put in multiple bids to run the new polyclinics and, if the government's plans are allowed to go through, GP services will soon be in the hands of multinational corporations, such as the US company UnitedHealth.

Corporate-run polyclinics will put profit maximisation ahead of the interests of patients - dealing a fatal blow to the whole ethos of the NHS.

We must not let it happen.


DON'T think the neoliberal ideologues who have dominated the public discourse over the past 30 years will go down without a fight.

Despite the total discrediting of the "free market" economic system they advocate, a group of influential neoliberal think tanks are still trying to persuade us that the answer to the problems we face today is yet more "market-based solutions." One such think-tank is Reform.

Reform says its mission "is to set out a better way to deliver public services." And the director of Reform, a former Conservative policy wonk called Andrew Haldenby, wants "smaller government."

In a recent article, he enthused over a sentence in the new government white paper on public-sector reform which said that "a responsive state should withdraw from areas in which it is no longer needed."

There's no prizes for guessing which area Haldenby and his fellow neoliberal fanatics think the state should withdraw from.

In a recent report, Reform called for "radical change" in health-care provision in Britain, with "other insurers" allowed to join the system and the NHS replaced with a National Health Protection Service.

We all know who would benefit from such "radical" changes - it certainly wouldn't be you or I, dear reader.


Another fine mess...

WHAT would you do with £97 billion? You might have thought that any government or country which received such an enormous sum would be quite a prosperous place, with no need for IMF bail-outs or other rescue packages. Think again.

The Hungarian state has received 105bn euros in privatisation revenue for the years 1990-2007, a period during which thousands of publicly owned assets were sold off.

Pro-privatisation ideologues argued that selling off "inefficient" state-run enterprises and fully embracing a programme of "economic reform" would make Hungary a more prosperous country.

In fact, after 20 years of privatisation, Hungary's economic situation has worsened.

Despite the huge bonanza of privatisation revenue, the country's finances are in a parlous state.

Last autumn, the country received a 20bn euros (£18.6bn) international rescue package. Now, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany is calling for further help to bail-out his near-bankrupt country.

With the Hungarian health service in crisis due to a lack of government investment, the Hungarian people are, understandably asking a very simple question. Where did all the money go?


Still milking our railway

RECESSION? What recession? For British bus and train operator Arriva plc, the money keeps rolling in. The company, which runs public transport in 12 European countries including Britain, made pre-tax profits of £150m last year.

Its rail franchises, which now include the CrossCountry Aberdeen to Penzance route, brought in £837.8m - up 160 per cent on the previous 12 months - while its bus revenue jumped by 13 per cent to £922.4m.

Arriva is just one of a small handful of companies which has made extraordinary amounts of money due to the privatisation of public transport in Britain and abroad. And much of the money has come from public subsidies the company, in common with other private transport providers, receive from the taxpayer.

Around £2.5bn is handed over each year to Britain's bus companies, leading to the companies being labelled "subsidy junkies" by Graham Stringer MP of the transport select committee.

Instead of subsiding private companies, wouldn't it be more logical - and more economical for taxpayers - if the government simply brought back British Rail and the National Bus Company?

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This article of mine on the state of NHS dentistry appears in the New Statesman.

patient: How much to have this tooth pulled?
dentist: £180.
patient: £180 for just a few minutes' work?
dentist: I can extract it very slowly if you like.


Jokes about going to the dentist used to be about the pain of tooth extraction, but in 21st-century Britain they're more likely to be about the pain to our wallets. An estimated one in five people in Britain is deterred from going to the dentist because of the cost; eight million of us have refused a course of treatment because it was too expensive. The seemingly inexorable decline of affordable National Health Service dentistry, and the growth of private practice (the most expensive in Europe), have certainly hurt our pockets.

But could it be that, after years of decline, the tide is turning? You wouldn't think so, judging by newspaper headlines reacting to newly published figures showing that more than one million patients in England have lost access to free dentistry since the introduction of the government's new NHS dental contract in April 2006.

The figures, according to Susie Sanderson, chair of the British Dental Association's executive board, were "further evidence of the persisting problems with the 2006 NHS dental reforms". But look a little closer. There were 655 more dentists doing NHS work in 2007-2008 than there were in the previous year, an increase of 3.2 per cent. NHS dental treatments also rose last year by nearly one million, to 36 million. And while Sanderson and her organisation attack the government for introducing a "crude, target-driven system", there is growing evidence that the BDA's members don't share this disdain.

The government's chief dental officer, Dr Barry Cockcroft, cites the example of Cornwall Primary Care Trust, which, when asking for tenders for four new NHS practices, received more than 80 applicants. "When primary care trusts ask for tenders for new services, dentists are falling over themselves to bid for them," he says.

It seems that some dentists are deciding that the NHS contracts, which provide dentists with a guaranteed salary of roughly £80,000 a year for three years and a 5 per cent reduction in their workload, are not such a bad deal after all. The economic slowdown could also be helping the return of dentists to the fold. Dr Mark Harris was among 2,000 to resign from the NHS prior to the introduction of the new contracts. Now he has applied to Devon Primary Care Trust to provide NHS care for adults at his Totnes practice. "I think when there isn't much money about, the best arrangement is a mixture of NHS and private work," he admits.

The dramatic decline of NHS dentistry can be traced to the decision of John Major's government to cut the fees payable to NHS dentists in the early 1990s - something to remember during the current wave of nostalgia for the former Conservative prime minister. The decision led to an exodus of dentists from the NHS into private practice. In 1990, before the cuts, only 5 per cent of dentists' earnings came from the private sector; today it accounts for more than half. And as private practice has grown, so the overriding commitment of the dental profession and its governing body to the NHS has weakened.

Throughout the 1990s, one could not question the fervency of the BDA's support for the NHS, but today the emphasis appears to have changed. In her speech to the BDA's May conference in Manchester, Sanderson enthused over the merits of private dentistry. "For many [here], private dentistry has given you the opportunity to work the way you want to, without any sense of compromise," she said. "It has given you freedom." She went on to express scepticism as to whether the NHS could ever meet the "expectations of patients and users".

It is hard not to detect a certain air of defeatism - Sanderson claimed last year that the future of NHS dentistry was "increasingly fragile" - and the BDA's disenchantment with NHS reforms has been seized upon by those opposed to the very idea of NHS care. In its own words, Nurses for Reform, a pro-privatisation pressure group, wants "to see NHS dentistry totally collapse".
"We want customers to be angry at how little they are getting for their taxation, and we want them to defect to a burgeoning private dental sector," writes the group's director, Dr Helen Evans, whose anti-NHS polemic Who Cares for the NHS? was published by the Institute of Economic Affairs earlier this year. "Already, in many [politicians'] minds, the NHS is dead," Evans claimed, having previously described the service as a "Stalinist embarrassment".

Open wide (your wallet)

The favoured gambit of the private dentistry lobby is to make NHS dentistry seem like a lost cause and the complete privatisation of dental care inevitable. If this all sounds familiar, then cast your mind back to the early 1990s when the same "the system's so broke it can't be mended" arguments were made by free-market think tanks lobbying for British Rail's denationalisation.

But nothing is inevitable until it happens - and there is nothing inevitable about the demise of NHS dentistry. The return of dentists to the NHS fold is a fact that fits neither Nurses for Reform nor the BDA's doom-laden prognosis. The increased number of places for training NHS dentists also gives grounds for optimism, as does the government's decision to increase funding for NHS dentistry by 11 per cent next year. And all three main parties remain formally committed to increasing provision.

In the final analysis, the future of NHS dentistry will be guaranteed only if voters raise their voices to urge that more resources be spent on improving access to the service. And the importance of expanding NHS dentistry cannot be overestimated if we care about both our teeth and our wallets: the decline in NHS provision over the past two decades has led to a major deterioration in the nation's oral health. In some parts of the country, tooth decay rose by 50 per cent between 1993 and 2003; mouth cancer has risen by around 25 per cent, with more than 4,700 new cases being diagnosed in the UK each year. The replacement of NHS dentistry with a wholly private system, as free-market pressure groups desire, would prove as catastrophic as the privatisation of the railways has been.

If we want to know what a Britain without any NHS dentistry would be like, we need only look to the United States, where more than 100 million people are without dental insurance and 27 per cent of children and 29 per cent of adults have cavities that go untreated. Last year, a child in Mississippi and another in Maryland died from infections caused by decayed teeth.

When the NHS was formed, exactly 60 years ago this summer, it promised to provide "all medical, dental and nursing care". Free NHS dental care may only have lasted until 1951 - the first year that NHS charges were introduced - but for more than 40 years the NHS provided Britons with access to good-quality and affordable dental treatment. The question that needs to be asked of the free-market ideologues who are already gleefully writing its epitaph is a simple one: if Britain could afford - and operate - a comprehensive NHS dental system in the austerity years of the 1940s and the recession-hit 1970s, why on earth can't we do the same today?

We'll know for sure that we've stopped the rot when dentist jokes are once again about extracting teeth, and not extracting money.

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From today's Sunday Express, via The Campaign for Public Ownership:

VIRGIN tycoon Sir Richard Branson is being courted by health chiefs planning to privatise hospital casualty units.
Tens of thousands of patients walking into Accident and Emergency departments could be treated by the private sector in sweeping reforms of the NHS.
Billionaire Branson and his 26-year-old daughter Holly, who recently qualified as a doctor, plan to bid to run the new generation of GP super-surgeries called polyclinics.
Health chiefs in north London have confirmed that a meeting was held with senior officials from Branson's fledgling firm Virgin Healthcare.
Discussions took place about closing four GP surgeries in Camden and merging them to form a polyclinic at University College Hospital, pictured right.
The clinic, in a disused casualty wing, would treat all emergency cases except those brought in by ambulance or referred by GPs ñ about 70,000 patients a year.

I'm sure the pro-NHS privatisation brigade will be ecstatic at this news. After all, Dr Branson has made such a good job of running Britain's privatised trains, hasn't he?

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The National Health Service, the greatest of all the many great achievements of the post-war 'Old' Labour governments of 1945-51, is 60 years old today.

How should we mark the anniversary? By wearing badges like Nu Labour politicians and pretending that everything's hunky dory? No, we should mark the anniversary by doing all we can to restore the NHS to its original state. That means an immediate halt to plans for the greater involvement of private companies in public health provision. It means axing the planned polyclinics- which would eventually be run by big business. It means scrapping the scandalously expensive PFI schemes. It means bringing back in-house those hospital activities which have been privatised to such disastrous effect- such as cleaning and catering. It means putting Matron back in charge of the wards and stopping the politically motivated attacks on the medical profession. It means restoring NHS dentistry and scrapping prescription charges in England. In short it means fighting for the sort of National Health Service that that great socialist and humanitarian politician Aneurin Bevan envisaged sixty years ago.

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