by Priscilla Alderson.
Here in three minutes is what is really happening to the NHS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2Z-iIBYwY
For everyone who voted for Labour hoping to ‘save the NHS’ from being privatised, recent news raises questions. District General Hospitals usefully centralise all the interrelated local clinical services. However, hospital departments that offer quicker profits are being cut out of hospitals and placed in privatised ‘hubs’, with the claim that these are nearer people’s homes. Expensive services, such as heart surgery and cancer care are left in the NHS with fewer support services.
Integrated Care Boards (replacing former NHS Authorities) include private healthcare company executives as board members. One South-West board has agreed a 7-year contract with a private health and social care company (HCRG formerly Virgin Care) to pay them £1.8bn to provide ‘Integrated Community Based Care for Children, Young People and Adults services across the area’ (1).
Alan Milburn, the recently appointed a lead director of the Department of Health and Social Care, organised New Labour’s first privatising of clinical care and the PFI deals, with taxpayers still paying £billions extra to private companies to build and run hospitals. Since then, Alan Milburn has worked as a highly paid consultant advising commercial companies how to take on NHS services.
At the Labour Party Summit on 14th October, to encourage private companies to increase their investment in the UK, Eli Lilly planned to invest £279 million in UK healthcare. Next day, Wes Streeting the Health Secretary promoted Eli Lilly’s slimming drugs on radio and tv. A former President of the Royal College of GPs was asked to comment on radio 4, but she was vague about the problems. The College is partly funded by drug companies.
Dr Bob Gill, a socialist GP, gave a clearer list of some problems with slimming ‘wonder drugs’ Zepbound and Mounjaro.
- Obesity is caused by poor diet, ultrahigh processed foods, lifestyle, and heavy advertising. The drugs cannot solve or prevent these social problems.
- The drugs have serious and sometimes life-long side-effects, some associated with suicide.
- The brain and gut are tricked into feeling full; in rare cases there is permanent gastric paralysis.
- The drugs burn off body fat and also muscle mass, which weakens the body.
- When they stop taking the drug, most people put back on all their former weight, but with less muscle to carry it.
- Wes Streeting’s view that the drugs could help overweight people return to paid work risks forcing people into accepting the injections for fear of losing unemployment benefits.
- The weekly injections and necessary monitoring by healthcare staff, besides treatments for side effects potentially for millions of patients, will be a massive burden on the NHS.
- The government policy reinforces negative attitudes towards ‘fat lazy people who are burdens on society’, blaming them instead of social systems that need to be changed.
Dr Gill added that the government is colluding with profit-hungry multinational drug companies that exaggerate the benefits and hide the harms of their products. They are routinely fined $billions for malpractice in the USA. Politicians work with them to blind the public with pseudoscience, whereas politicians need to ask, ‘Show me the overwhelming evidence that the benefits you offer exceed the harms.’ Alan Milburn’s profits suggest why politicians are not doing this.
Friends might want to find out plans for privatising their local healthcare services, and contact their MPs about this.
2. This was shown on the online Crispin Flintoff Show 20/10/24. Crispin’s parents were for many years on the committee of the Quaker Socialist Society.
[Note: Richard Murphy, who gave the 2014 Salter Lecture, explains how Wes Streeting is determined to privatise the NHS and our medical records on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMFFVuhgcBU]
Quaker Socialist Society 