GP Dr Bob Gill uncovers the real reason for Hunt’s attack on junior doctors. Junior doctors’ reduced income (through loss of unsocial hours pay) and increased hours performing routine work in evenings and weekends, would increase profitability for the private health care companies that are set to take over the NHS as the Five Year Forward View rolls out.

The government’s latest assault on the NHS involves imposing a new contract for junior doctors that will see their salaries slashed by 30%, with a requirement for evening and Saturday work. The excuse is that this change will provide a 7 day service and improve patient outcomes on weekends.

The reality is that more qualified staff are being driven out, in preparation for the deskilling that is always part of healthcare privatisation and corporate takeover.

This is mapped out in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View – the brainchild of Simon Stevens, previously an executive at the global American health insurance company UnitedHealth and now head of NHS England.

Many junior medics (all doctors not senior enough to work in consultant positions) have been stirred into action.

For their campaign to be effective, it needs to protect patients, restore decent treatment of staff and forestall the endgame of NHS privatisation.

But not all junior doctors are convinced that this is the hidden agenda behind Hunt’s contract, although they clearly see how unsafe and unfair it is.

So here is a review of the 40 year creep of stealth privatisation, and an outline of the endgame it has now unmistakably reached – once you know what to look for.

40 year creep of NHS privatisation

Turning the NHS from a publicly funded, provided and universal system to a private insurance model has been proposed for decades.

In 1968 Arthur Seldon – later Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation policy adviser –  produced a pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs titled ‘After the NHS’. This aimed to “improve the NHS” by abolishing it, so as to build profit opportunities for the insurance industry.

Similar plans to enable the insurance industry to increase its profits in the UK, by destroying the NHS, re-surfaced in the 1980s, with Health of Nations by the Adam Smith Institute  and The Biggest Enterprise – ideas for radical reform of the NHS by the current Conservative Minister of State for Government Policy, Oliver Letwin MP and John Redwood MP.

Key architects of stealth privatisation:  governments, mass media and the BMA

Stealth privatisation of the NHS began quietly under the Thatcher administration and has continued unabated ever since.

Underhanded Governments

When the Letwin and Redwood plan was presented to a Conservative cabinet in 1983, it was so roundly rejected as an electoral suicide note that the decision was taken to complete the privatisation by covert means, under a series of false narratives that distracted the public from what was really taking place.

The key stages were of this rip off were:

• Outsourcing non-clinical services.
• The introduction of market bureaucracy.
• Splitting the hospital network into independent Trusts.
• Usurious Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals that gouged the public purse through inflating the costs of funding new hospital building. PFI started under the John Major government and took off under New Labour.

Blair’s US-sponsored New Labour government continued with the privatisation project, with successive ‘pointless top-down reorganisations’ that precisely followed the steps laid out in the ‘Health of Nations’ NHS privatisation plan.

Consecutive governments muddied debates about health reform with their spin and misdirection. They energetically privatised NHS posts, whose incumbents were in a position to point out government lies to their medical colleagues and the lay public.

Mainstream media – weapons of mass distraction

The success of the project also depended on public ignorance and distracting attention with myths. Large sections of the media obliged – in particular the BBC. Our public service broadcaster has avoided scrutinising health reforms. Instead it has regurgitated government spin, peddled myths and presented pro-privatisation think tanks as independent. In a process that amounts to censorship by omission, it has ignored growing public and professional protest

British Medical Association – keeping members in the dark

The British Medical Association has spent the last two decades gently nodding through marketization and privatisation under the guise of ‘critical engagement’. They have provided no effective challenge to government policy, and they have kept members in the dark to a degree that suggests complicity at leadership level. Genuine opposition by BMA leaders to the Health and Social Care Act 2012 could have prevented the NHS being carved up for profiteers.

Unfortunately it seems that while the BMA ostensibly represents doctors, and is funded by them, in fact it seems to have been dancing to some different tune where the NHS privatisation is concerned.

What a difference two low dishonest decades make

The NHS has been fundamentally transformed in the last 20 years. It is now at the  privatisation endgame.

Our nationally-integrated hospital network has been split up into distinct business units (“foundation trusts”), which were deliberately burdened with PFI millstones designed to throw them into insolvency as soon as a funding squeeze was applied to trigger this, at the right time for the privatisation.

Since 2013, NHS services have been funded through clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), designed by John Redwood MP to be self-collapsing, state-funded insurance pools.

Though CCG governing bodies are fronted by GPs, the commissioning decisions CCGs take are shaped by a set of rules which incentivise outsourcing to private healthcare companies, with administrative support provided by yet more private companies.

CCG boards have great discretion over which services they will pay for; NHS-funded care will be increasingly restricted, bringing an end to universal and comprehensive care. A rump of NHS services will lead to patients paying charges for care, out of pocket or through private health insurance. Or as Letwin and Redwood pointed out in 1988:

“Another avenue which has been tentatively explored by the Government is charging. In principle, this could be extended to the point of universality — a charge for every service.” page 16

CCGs were designed as transitional bodies to be taken over by private insurers, accountancy firms and management consultants, an army of unnecessary intermediaries siphoning away money from delivery of healthcare. GPs have been set up to be the scapegoats for the demise of the NHS.

Disempowerment, corruption and scapegoating of health professionals

In order to re-purpose the NHS from a health service to a business, the traditional medical leadership had to be replaced with a general management structure . Hospitals and health boards had their small, clinically dominated and patient-focused membership replaced by functionaries less inclined and equipped to protest about damaging patient services and quality of care.

Introduction of the internal market, targets and performance management gave rise to an explosion in numbers of administrators and managers.  The divide and rule manoeuvre of the purchaser-provider split set up GPs against hospital doctors. This has handed GPs the axe to take to hospital services, contrary to the patients’ interest and in the face of opposition from hospital colleagues.

New Public Management blurred the distinction between public and private sector and allowed money to be  siphoned away from patient care.

This bloated administrative structure imposed government policy irrespective of the effects on patients – most infamously, at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust where achieving financial performance targets to qualify for Foundation Trust status took priority over safe staffing levels.

Spin meisters crafted messages that allowed officials and politicians to blame staff for lacking compassion or commitment, while avoiding their responsibility for management and government policy failings.

A culture of fear and intimidation for those who dare speak out about preventable patient harm has been exposed repeatedly over recent years. The perpetrators escape sanction and many are promoted. Contrast this with the career destruction and psychological torment for the whistle-blowers.

Public money is wasted on cover-ups of malpractice linked to the privatising leadership clique in hospitals. Some whistle-blowers are banned from coming into work, and this costs money. Dr Kim Holt told her superiors of the risks that later led to the death of Baby P, and their reaction was to send her home from work and hire locums to do her job, at a cost to the public purse of around £1 million.

The incredible shrinking NHS

Clinical autonomy is severely restricted due to lack of resources, so doctors may no longer be allowed to do what is right for patients because of bureaucratic restrictions introduced as part of the reshaping for privatisation.

The NHS has lost over 50% of acute beds since 1979, leaving us with some of the most meagre hospital provision in Europe. The UK has just 2.8 beds per 1000 population compared to 6.3 and 8.3 for France and Germany respectively. Doctors have to discharge patients prematurely to make space for sicker patients, but that can hamper recovery, or worse.

Outpatient clinic appointments are also being cut, and the market prevents patients being referred directly between specialists without first being sent back to their GP’s, who have to make the referral. This frustrating, inefficient additional bureaucratic hurdle was created to suit NHS marketization, not the patient or doctor.

NHS administration costs have increased from 5% (before the privatisation process started in the 1970s) to 14% by 2005, amounting to over £10 billion per year additional cost without patient benefit. And the American system to which government aspires spent 31% by 2003.

The cost of repayment of £11 billion in PFI loans will be over £80 billion. Doctors anguish over patients being denied a bed or other essential care, whilst extortionate sums of money are squandered on market administration, outsourcing and PFI payments.

Betrayals, flux, confusion and fear – working in the NHS

Motivated by self-interest, in pursuit of promotion, performance related pay and bonuses,  a significant minority of doctors have helped to betray the public and their colleagues. They have been busy downplaying and distracting from others’ concerns over privatisation; ensuring the BMA remains a feeble representative body; and colluding with management and politicians in promoting hospital cuts and closures which will endanger patients’ lives.

Some are paid advocates for reconfigurations of NHS services, that have been expensively concocted by management consultants and accountancy firms, whose glaring conflicts of interest barely get a mention in public discourse.

In this environment of constant flux, confusion and stress, most NHS workers rarely delve into the detail of what is going on around them but remain preoccupied with dealing with the consequences. Apathy, ignorance, fear, disempowerment and a sense of futility combine to make a powerful disincentive to push back.

Instead NHS staff just keep their heads down and get on with the day (and night) job.

This is so far from the vision of being a doctor in a civilised, open and accountable democracy. Working in the NHS has been transformed from feeling like part of a large family working for the common good, to resembling a totalitarian state where survival is dependent on wilful blindness to all that fails our patients and colleagues. No wonder more than two-thirds employees are seriously considering leaving the NHS (18).

The Future – United Health’s stealth takeover of the NHS

The blueprint for the final stage of the NHS privatisation and conversion to a private insurance system is to be found in the Five Year Forward View, conjured up by SImon Stevens, the NHS England chief who was previously  Vice President at American health insurance company, United Health.

Proposals that will profoundly alter the NHS in favour of his former employer have escaped exposure and scrutiny.

Like many policy documents before it, the true intent is coded within harmless sounding text. No mention of ‘privatisation’ ‘competition’, ‘market’ or the growing role of commercial insurance in the NHS.

Instead we see code words like ‘innovation’, ‘choice’, ‘modernisation’, ‘integration’, ‘partnership’ and ‘prime contracting’.

The introduction claims a strong commitment to the NHS and then goes on to promote its carve-up. The proposals will replace the last vestiges of the NHS with ‘New Models of Care’ (NMC) which reformat the internal structure of the NHS to less flexible, more costly arrangements which better suit the commercial insurers destined to take over the system (see Seldon, Letwin & Redwood, Pirie & Butler, etc, mentioned above).

A further £20 billion shortfall in funding is celebrated as ‘efficiency savings’.

Five Year Forward View – a masterpiece in spin and deception

This masterpiece in spin and deception hides the reality of further hospital closures, GP surgery closures, staff reductions, pay cuts and reduction in qualified staff. Patients’ medical needs will be serviced by non-existent community services.

The same con trick was pulled in the 1990s with mental health services, under the ‘care in the community’ narrative. Publicly owned psychiatric institutions were shut down and flogged off with insufficient replacement services to support patients.

Access to competent life-saving emergency care will be drastically reduced. Specialist hospital services will be cut and concentrated in fewer larger centres. This, according to Stevens:

“could avoid the need for another 17,000 hospital beds – equivalent to opening 34 extra 500-bedded hospitals over the next five years” (page 36)

Or put another way, NMC will enable the closure of another 34 district general hospitals.

“More generally….NHS employers and staff and their representatives will need to consider how working patterns and pay and terms and conditions can best evolve to fully reward high performance, support job and service redesign …” page 31

Some of the investment required for the NMC will come from the sale of NHS land and assets and by 2020 the NMC could be put out to tender for international corporations to make ‘productive investment’ i.e. extract profit.

Modern workforce – cheaper, quicker to train, deskilled

Junior doctors’ loss of income and increased hours performing routine work in previously defined unsocial hours will increase profitability for the new players providing healthcare.

The ‘modern workforce’ created through the ‘Shape of Training Review’ for medical students and ‘Shape of Care review’ for nurses and creation of ‘transitional roles’ is designed to produce a cheaper and quicker to train, less qualified workforce.

We are told that they will be performing new roles ‘across organisational and sector boundaries’, i.e. doing things they aren’t qualified to do. This represents a whole scale deskilling of the workforce, with nurses and Physicians Assistants doing doctors work, health care assistants doing nurses work and volunteers doing HCAs work. No qualifications whatsoever are needed to enter an NHS hospital as a paid HCA, to do work formerly reserved for qualified nurses.

We are starting to be softened up for the ‘HealthForce’ of volunteers: we won’t even be paying the unskilled people we get to do nurses jobs! This is about to start becoming really dangerous for patients – just as the monitoring of NHS performance is in the process of being privatised.

What now for Junior Doctors? Up against well funded, cunning and lying powers

The prospect of a 30% reduction in pay, through restriction of unsocial hours payment and an increased working week, has been the prompt for protest and a potential spark for a brain drain. Thousands of junior doctors are  preparing documentation to emigrate. Leaving the NHS for pastures new is an entirely justified response, but will do nothing to defend the NHS for the relatives and friends left behind who may need to rely on it for care.

Those who leave now, in the hope of coming back later when the dust has settled, may find that the NHS has dwindled to a threadbare remnant in their absence, and the country will be a worse place for it. We are collectively faced with one of the greatest political betrayals of the public interest: destroying the best healthcare system in the industrialised world and replacing it with a model resembling the worst (23).

Medics are highly trusted by the public and could prove a powerful voice against Stevens, Hunt and Letwin. NHS activists have been desperately hoping for more medical leaders to join their ranks and help break the silence. Local communities would welcome junior doctors’ contribution in defending the NHS. No doubt the stakes are high – serious consideration has to be given to personal and professional damage. Pressure to stay in the shadows may come from employers and unexpected quarters.

It is crucial to understand the scale of the privatisation industry and their broad influence over our politics and media, and the fact that they are now presiding over the discontinuation of the welfare state. They are well funded and cunning, but they are lying. We must educate ourselves and the wider public on the truth of the threat to the NHS to mount a defence. The documentary ‘Sell-Off’  gives a summary of what has happened in England. Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ film exposes how the American system fails private healthcare insurance policy holders.

The privatisation project is well planned and effective. Many of the potential defenders have been effectively neutralised by privatisation sympathisers at leadership level, including the BMA and Royal Colleges. Resistance from these quarters has been more symbolic than genuinely designed to succeed.

In the UK it was essential to have New Labour as a controlled opposition to  carry the privatisation baton between 1997 and 2010. Since back in opposition Labour is providing tokenistic resistance and diverting genuine grassroots activism, whilst simultaneously promoting the massive corporate power grab in the form of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

What shall doctors do? Join forces with Defend the NHS activists

Junior doctors have overwhelming public support for industrial action but must be vigilant to avoid hidden traps. With vast sums of money up for grabs, the privatisation lobby will stop at nothing to permanently and irreversibly break open the NHS for exploitation and profiteering at the expense of patients, staff and the taxpayer.

It is essential to recognise and avoid or counteract techniques that the American health insurance industry has successfully deployed for decades to neutralise attempts to improve healthcare for Americans. These techniques include the use of front groups, third party advocates, think tanks and other propaganda channels.

Join or support local NHS campaigns and network with health activists to learn about the local issues and share your experience. Sharing knowledge is vital to maximise the impact of future activity.

Clear and simple messaging is important to influence the widest audience. The treatment of Junior Doctors is inextricably linked to the privatisation agenda. Attempts to separate these issues will squander an opportunity to alert the public at large to the major heist that is under way. Advice to uncouple these issues should be rejected and recognised as counterproductive or duplicitous.

Campaign for an end to privatisation, restoration of the NHS THROUGH RENATIONALISATION as a publicly funded and provided universal health service with reinstatement of the Secretary of State for Health’s legal duty to provide. It will only be possible to protect patient care and improve terms and conditions for staff in a RENATIONALISED publicly run, not for profit system. Anything less will not escape corporate capture through the EU-US so-called trade deal – TTIP.

Speak out about what is going on in your workplace, taking care not to put your career on the line. That said, there will be few places for doctors in the Five-Year Plan’s deskilled NHS, unless you are willing to work for clerk’s wages using computer packages rather than clinical judgement, just in order to be able to help patients in the NHS.

Exposing the damage inflicted by frontline services cuts is powerful evidence against  privatisation. Spread the word to your friends, family and to your patients. Cultivate trusted local journalists and activists to be the conduit for your voice, and write and present the material yourself to the extent that you are able to learn how to do this effectively. Use every available platform from talking to people on the street to broadcast and social media. The greater the public awareness and understanding about what is happening to their health service the harder the privatisation becomes.

Pleading and petitioning of our politicians has failed to hinder the privatisation, but many are still taking this approach. Both Conservative Party and the Labour opposition support Stevens’ final solution for the NHS, and control over the NHS currently remains in the firm grip of the corporate raiders. Doctors, nurses, patients, campaigners and everyone they can get to join in must help build a mass movement to expose what is going on and fight for our NHS.