Immediate release – 20 May 2015
David Cameron has pledged to make the ‘7-day NHS’ a working reality, without spelling out how it can be done without extra money. But how the NHS spends its money should be as big a worry as how much money it is going to get. Because increasingly those decisions are being handed over not to GPs, to take ‘local’ decisions, as the government described its plans under the Health and Social Care Act, but to private-health consortia such as Capita and US healthcare giant, United Health.
More and more of the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) decisions – which determine which services are bought for the NHS – are being handed to private-health firms, as an increasing number of GPs choose to hand over CCG control.
This has been highlighted in a report by Spinwatch, and shows only too clearly what the true agenda for health is: privatisation.
The basic conflict of interest seems to go unnoticed: as these firms are not only being given the ability to control CCG decisions, but in an increasing number of cases are the recipients of the contracted-out services the CCGs have to rule on. Privatisation by stealth, accompanied by a complete lack of ethics. Hardly the way to treat the ’embodiment of one-nation politics’, which Mr Cameron claims is behind government proposals to transform NHS services.
KONP spokesman Alan Taman said:
“This shows how the NHS is being given over to private-health companies by stealth. On the one hand, we are asked to believe the NHS is safe, the embodiment of what unifies us and brings us together. Yet on the other, private-health corporations are allowed to rule on how our NHS money is spent; and that can easily mean they themselves benefit.
“We are told that the NHS is going to get better. The reality is, it will be given away to organisations whose first loyalty is to their shareholders unless people fight to stop this travesty. Please, join us to try to stop this and keep the NHS as a public service.”
ENDS
Editors’ Note
Contact KONP Campaigns and Press Officer Alan Taman – 07870 757 309
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