One step away from a privatised NHS one less Tory invention
I think this tells you everything you need to know:
former Tory health minister James Bethell tweeted: “I wish we’d had the guts to do this.”
The Tories made an expensive mess and didn’t have the ability to clean up after themselves.
Cuts aside, the biggest concern will be the lack of regulation. Or increased politicisation of the NHS.
I expect Streeting wants to increase his ability to force NHS to pay for services from private companies. The talk of cutting red tape likely means a move towards American style healthcare where ‘the customer is Always right’
In effect this means that patients will be able to demand more procedures which private companies will provide. However, they will only do profitable ones. This will ultimately leave less money for more complex health issues in the budget. Remember private healthcare always costs the NHS way more than if they had the capacity themselves. Purposely using private healthcare is a way of diminishing the service NHS is able to provide, paving the way for full private systems. Its also another fuck you to complex cases, ie disabled people.
This BBC article is just manufactured consent for cuts.
Quangos - “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations” - are set up by government to oversee regulations and operate independently from politicians.
NHS England was created as part of the 2012 reforms introduced under former Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley.
The idea was to free the health service from political meddling – with ministers instead setting the wider strategy, but stepping back from getting involved on a daily basis.
In the years afterwards NHS England has exercised that independence. This was most notable under the leadership of Sir Simon Stevens, who challenged and pressed the Theresa May government into increasing funding.
In the late 2010s, after Lansley had left government, Conservative health ministers privately expressed frustration that the single-biggest part of their brief was outside of their control.
As soon as Streeting took charge at the DHSC last summer, it was clear he felt the same and NHS England was on borrowed time.
I think this is a good direction. “NHS England” was a pointless layer of bureaucracy, and cynically I believe the primary reason the Tories introduced it was in the hope that bad news about the NHS would be blamed on the NHS England organisation, not the (technically separate but practically not) government. Which didn’t really work, people still blamed the Tories for waiting lists and such.
The only potential positive I see with the current system is that if there’s a change in government, the people running the NHS don’t change, so theoretically there’s not a sudden shift in how it operates that would interrupt plans and cause turmoil. In reality, though, the government affects a lot of what NHS-E do, so the government has a major effect either way.
