Dear supporter
As predicted, the NHS has now been pushed into an avoidable and unprecedented collapse. Thousands of us are dying needlessly every month. Nurses are striking for the first time in NHS history. Ambulance workers have also walked out. Over half of hospital doctors want to leave the NHS. The British Medical Journal say government’s failure to protect us is “social murder”. Yet…
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in January that he plans more NHS privatisation and more use of the private sector. He previously flew to the USA to talk to private healthcare firms and, last November, appointed a private healthcare lobbiest as his advisor.
Opposition leader Keir Starmer the very next day proposed addressing the ongoing NHS crisis by working with the private sector in a “partnership model”.
Health Secretary Steve Barclay says that the NHS has all the funding it needs and that there is no crisis. It is simply under pressure due to a Streptococcus A outbreak, seasonal flu and people waiting for Covid19 to pass before going to see their GP.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting says we need to use the private sector to reduce NHS waiting lists.
They are all wrong. Privatisation does not and will not solve the NHS crisis. Privatisation is the root cause of the problem. It is well known that it leads to worse services and longer waiting lists.
The British Medical Association say the Prime Minister is “delusional” and admit that the NHS is at “breaking point”.
Both political parties have sped up NHS privatisation. Yet, even NHS England boss, Amanda Pritchard, warns that paying private hospitals for NHS care risks wasting public money. In fact, private healthcare companies often:
- Rip off the NHS by taking huge amounts of money for services they don’t deliver
- Provide a poorer quality of care as they lack the NHS’s back-up teams of specialists
- Poach doctors, nurses and other staff from the NHS
- Cherry-pick those patients with easy, quick and profitable health problems
- Avoid the most expensive and very sick patients
The doctors and nurses working in private hospitals to provide private healthcare are predominantly NHS staff doing shifts on top of their NHS jobs. Politicians don’t understand that, without the NHS, the private healthcare they can afford to rely on would fall apart!
Politicians of both main parties have deliberately run down the NHS as a known privatisation tactic.
£100 billion has been taken from NHS budgets in the last 10 years and given to private providers. £150 billion has been taken from NHS budgets in the last 30 years to fund the internal market.
£80 billion is being taken from NHS budgets to repay £11billion in rip-off private PFI loans.
All of this has been designed to throw the NHS into crisis, engineer its collapse and has caused:
- Thousands of avoidable deaths every month
- 500 people dying every week from delays in A&E
- 7.2 million people on waiting lists
- 150,000 medical staff vacancies
- 25,000 fewer beds than a decade ago (down 8%)
- NHS oxygen shortages
- More than a dozen NHS trusts declaring critical incidents over the Christmas period
13% of English mental health beds are owned by American corporations. 40% of the private mental health companies (including American ones) paid £1.3 million a day by the NHS need safety ‘improvement’. Over 44,000 patients waited more than 12 hours for a bed in Oct 22. Research shows that, for every 80 patients waiting, one patient dies a preventable death.
Privatisation and the stealth drive to an Americanised health model has led to a collapsing NHS.
We need the private sector out of our NHS, and health put before profit. Instead of giving more money to private healthcare companies, we need to renationalise and invest in our NHS.
Tweet your MP, the PM, opposition leader, Health Sec, and shadow Health Sec. (Action 2) Tell them: Your support of privatisation is social murder! Stop Americanising our NHS now! Reverse privatisation! Commit to full renationalisation! Patient health over greed & private profit! Pay our precious doctors and nurses fair wages in line with top European nations!
Privatisation is against patients’ interests and only in the interests of private companies and foreign multinational corporations who siphon our taxes away from our treatment and care.
The standard technique of privatisation is to gradually de-fund and run down the service to get the public used to damaging policies. The government have privatised water, from which companies extract profits by pumping raw sewage into seas and rivers. Do we want this business ethos in healthcare?
A huge thank you for your support!
Your NHS Needs YOU!End privatisation. Support striking staff. Act now. New actions coming soon. Save our NHS!