Thereâs a concerning myth circulating at the moment, and itâs gathering momentum. Itâs one of those ideas that spreads quickly; because when a significant, complicated problem exists, weâre all desperate for a solution.
Politicians are often happy to offer up âsolutionsâ in these situations; reassuring voters that if theyâre entrusted with our votes, theyâll fix it. Politicians are very clever with their messaging, and as they present their âsolutionsâ, complicated things are made to sound simple. Peoplesâ frustration at the situation dissipates. And the politicians secure our votes.
But often in these situations, the solutions dreamt up by our politicians arenât quite accurate; they over-simplify the problems, or provide a quick fix rather than a long-term plan, or introduce new problems (problems which, later down the track, other politicians will dream up their own âsolutionsâ for).
Because we value the healthcare service highly, myths like these - political ideas which spread like wildfire and gain a degree of trust which they do not warrant - are rife amongst political plans for the NHS. We only need to look back to the last General Election for evidence. Boris Johnson claimed that his government would build 40 new hospitals for the NHS. As the boss of one NHS trust said in February 2023, âThereâs a 0% chance thereâs going to be 40 new hospitals by 2030â.
The newest myth gaining pace in politics, as we face the longest NHS waiting lists ever on record, is about privatisation. Wes Streeting wrote a piece for the Guardian at the end of last year entitled: âI donât want working class people in pain: so Iâd use private hospitals to bolster the NHSâ. And this wasnât an isolated example; Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer have both spoken up loudly in many media outlets in recent months about how they will utilise private sector capacity to help the NHS and bring down the waiting lists which are affecting millions upon millions of people.
If weâre being pragmatic about the situation, I think we need to accept that private sector capacity does have a small part to play in bringing down the NHS waiting lists. And I say that because if we want to treat patients as rapidly as possible, every single part of healthcare capacity in the UK should be utilised in the short-term. However, Streeting and Starmer are hugely over-stating the role that private healthcare could, and should, play in fixing the NHS. And so I thought I would share 3 facts which youâre free to share anywhere you like.
1. The private healthcare sector in the UK is not an enormous army ready to swoop in and fix things.
In September 2020, there were just 860 doctors working full-time in the private healthcare sector, compared to 159,100 full-time NHS doctors. Most of the doctors who work in the private sector do so on the side, alongside their NHS work. So if politicians pay the private sector lots of money to do NHS work, the private hospitals are effectively poaching NHS staff to do it. After all, the same treatment just could be provided within the NHS by the same staff. If politicians committed to paying NHS staff properly and resourcing the service adequately, they wouldnât need to rely on private sector capacity at all.
2. Even if we buy up all of the private hospital capacity, it could waste enormous sums of public money.
Politicians have proved to us in recent years that theyâre willing to spend, and waste, enormous amounts of money on private sector capacity. During the pandemic in 2020, by some estimates âthe NHS paid around ÂŁ400 million per month for use of the capacity of private hospitals, but two thirds of this capacity was completely unused because private healthcare facilities rely on contracting NHS doctors in their spare time.â
This is an outrageous waste of public funds. I havenât seen any explanation from Starmer or Streeting about how this wastage would be avoided if they spent money on buying up private hospitalsâ capacity.
3. NHS hospitals themselves are literally crumbling. Why is this situation not at the top of politiciansâ priority list?
There were more than 450 sewage leaks in NHS hospitals in the 12 months prior to Feb 2023. The leaks happened in A&E departments, cancer wards and maternity units, and many of the leaks even put patients and staff at risk. Why on earth are politicians talking about funnelling more money into the private healthcare sector, when NHS hospitals are literally crumbling to the point that NHS patients and staff are at risk?
We have a current repair backlog of ÂŁ10 billion in the NHS in England alone.
ÂŁ10 billion. Let that sink in.
The private sector will not âsave the NHSâ. The only thing which will save the NHS is investing in the actual NHS; supporting the current staff workforce, paying them properly, fixing the buildings, and doing everything we can to keep patients safe. The next General Election is fast-approaching, and the political rhetoric is ramping up. Letâs stop myths about private healthcare in their tracks; we want real solutions for the NHS, based on facts.
Please feel free to share this wherever youâd like. We need to raise awareness đ„
Take care, and I hope youâve had a lovely weekend,
Ju đ
Yet another spot on analysis.
Two stories came up in my newsfeed that stand out.
"Patients will be able to use NHS app to opt for private hospital care to help waiting lists"
What an absolute scam, this is purely to get the numbers down. Given a choice of waiting 2 years on the NHS or 6 weeks on the private option, it's a no brainer for the patient. For the government - waiting list reduced, money to private sector and for the NHS less in the pot, that could have been used to reduce waiting lists.
"Houses of Parliament Crumbling"
Apparently MPs are having to put up with, blocked and overflowing toilets, unsafe electrics, substandard plumbing, lack of facilities, crumbling plaster, rats in corridors (4 legged variety), workspaces not fit for purpose and constant disruption because of building work.
Yet again they are out of touch with the real world. This is normal for many hospitals through the country. Yet ÂŁ2m a WEEK is being poured in just to maintain the building. This isn't even the budget for the full refurbishment. That's estimated at ÂŁ14bn, think about HS2 and Crossrail and how they rocketed.
Amazing how funds are found for certain projects and yet ÂŁ10bn to get on top of NHS buildings?
This is just another strand of the long-standing Tory gaslighting about the NHS - the only goal they actually have is to terminate, as far as they can, all publicly-funded health services and transfer its user base, (us, the public), as a captive client list, to their (largely USA corporates) private healthcare cronies and leave us to bear the cost of healthcare behind a smokescreen of private insurance, which, for all but the very wealthy, means no healthcare.
For them, the end-game is to stop the flow of public money to health and social services, and to divert that public money, as a continuous and immensely profitable revenue stream, both via private healthcare organisations and via other more crony-lucrative non-healthcare programmes and projects, like freeports, that ensure that that our wealth flows not to public services and infrastructure and the associated employment and public welfare and benefit, but to the private and untouchable offshore coffers of the very wealthy.
What is perhaps most worrying at present is that Starmer and his clique in the Labour party seem fairly determined to follow exactly the same path when they take power. I think we have to lose any illusion that Labour will protect the NHS while it is led by the Starmer faction and recognise that the same neoliberal economic ideologies and what is, in reality, fiscal deception that drive Tory economic ideology, also drive Starmer's thinking. There is nothing in the least bit socialist or Labour about his stated NHS approach.
We are not going to achieve the goal of preserving and repairing the NHS without also finding a way to stop the public finances being used as a plutocratic petty cash tin and that requires a major revision of economic policy and fiscal methodology, along the lines of that envisaged by Positive Money. (https://positivemoney.org/)
In the near term, our focus needs to be on reaching as much of the UK public, and particularly, at this point, the Labour voter base, with the message that the future of the NHS and of our public fiscal policy and methodology are inextricably linked and that the latter has to be fixed to enable the NHS to be saved and that the route that the Tories and Starmer's Labour are plotting will destroy the NHS.
The private healthcare sector will not rescue the NHS, or even ameliorate its current problems - it will make obscene profits whilst exacerbating the current problems and, given the opportunity, it will destroy the NHS as a public health service and turn it into a private profit centre, to the great detriment of the nation and each and every one of us.
As an aside, our greatest enemy in this is the mainstream press, who are complicit in maintaining and propagating the fiscal mythology that continuously gnaws away at our well-being and prosperity and serves only the media oligarchs that own the press. The days when the mainstream press was the voice of the public that shouted out to preserve the public interest are long gone - today's MSM is nothing other than the voice of the oligarchic propaganda machine.