There was a drop of 30,000 patients with private medical insurance seeking treatment in the private sector between 2007 and 2009, and a fall of 45,000 patients paying directly. Yet private hospitals raked in £3.76 billion in 2009 – an increase of 7.5 percent.
This increase in profits for the private healthcare sector comes from ordinary taxpayers. As part of the hiving off of NHS work, patients on waiting lists are now able to opt for treatment in private hospitals, providing the cost is the same as that provided by the NHS. In 2007 55,900 patients opted for private treatment in this way. This rose to 212,000 in 2009. NHS patients in 2009 made up 22 percent of private hospital treatments, an increase from the 6.3 percent seen in 2007.
This is due to a process started by New Labour in an effort to bring down waiting lists but also to avoid further direct investment in the NHS. The ideological conviction of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was that private is always more efficient than public, and that profits are the only means by which problems in healthcare can be healed.
The coalition government has stepped up this marketisation several more notches. New plans mean that hospitals – public and private – will jostle for business from GPs, who will be encouraged to look to the balance sheet rather than medical notes as the prime factor in choosing where to send patients for treatment.
The supposed “ring-fencing” of NHS budgets means little if this flow of money into private hands continues. Much like the consequences of cuts and fees in higher education, a competitive environment is created in healthcare where the most financially fit will thrive and those that put patients before profits are not resuscitated.
In November of last year, there was a brief moment of light amid the darkness that was 2020. Scotland became the first country in the world to make period products free for all. Just as the weekend and the eight-hour-day are now regarded by many as a given, future generations may be in disbelief that...
On 4 November last year, when many of us were watching the aftermath of the American presidential election, the US formally left the Paris Climate Agreement. Written in 2015 at the United Nations’ COP21 climate conference in Paris, the agreement is often considered to be the most significant document of international climate cooperation. Back then,...
To say 2020 was dramatic would be an understatement. The world situation has been completely transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the inadequacy of governmental and state responses. As we head into 2021 it feels like we are entering uncharted territory. To make specific predictions would be unwise. But the Covid-19 crisis raises fundamental questions...
The 2020 crisis we’ve endured isn’t an aberration of the system but, as Alex Callinicos argues, an aspect of its permanent crisis.
