This caught my eye in the FT yesterday:
As the report notes:
US health insurer Centene is selling its chain of GP clinics, as well as the biggest private hospital group in the UK, as it abandons ambitious plans to make inroads into Britain's healthcare system.
In total, the company will be selling 60 GP surgeries. It has already sold the Circle/BMI UK hospital chain.
I was amused at the reasons given for these sales. Apart from the protests (which I suspect the company would have lived through if there was money to be made), it offered a number of excuses.
The first was that GP practices were only for sale in poorer areas and they were having difficulty getting GPs to work there. No surprise there then: this has always been true in the NHS.
Then they noted that their hospitals by and large were located in well-off areas. Again, no surprise there.
Linking these two issues, they noted that in that case there was little chance for their GP surgeries to refer to their private hospitals.
And, much to their surprise it seems, they had also found that less well-off patients were not that keen on saying for private hospital treatment.
In other words, there was no integration at all between their GP and hospital activities and neither prospered as they wished as a result.
My conclusions are threefold.
First, if they had not worked this out in advance, more fools them.
Second, this makes very clear how poor a profit motive is in the planning for healthcare.
Third, nothing will change this, which is why a government-coordinated and nationally supplied NHS is vital.
But will Wes Streeting take note of that? I am sure he will not.
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Not sure if it was this particular article or another in the FT, but there was a series of Below The Line comments from medical professionals saying they refuse work for some insurers or even ask patients for a ‘top up’ to get the best treatment. Only real ‘self paying’ patients get the best.
Won’t be long before the ‘insured’ start to find they are not and cannot be insulated from the problems of an under resourced NHS.
The mind boggles at some so called businesses
I noticed this comment on twitter yesterday
A bit off piste so to say but relevant none the less……
Quite remarkable that Britain’s media consensus on economics is such that Starmer’s plan to improve public services with no additional money is routinely treated as more realistic than Corbyn’s plan to improve public services by investing more money in them.
To see whether a private sector health service works, we just need to look at the USA, where we see multi-thousand dollar bills, and a significant proportion of the population with little or no access to healthcare.
We see some of this already entering British healthcare. More and more dental practices are refusing NHS patients, and significant dental work is unaffordable to many.
Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes have already siphoned £250-billion from public services into private hands.
Read: How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps by Dr Youssef El-Gingihy
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Dismantle-Easy-Steps-second/dp/1789041783/
Watch: The Great NHS Heist https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thegreatnhsheist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro-oU0us
It has occurred to me that the other thing about wealthy areas is that everything tends to be more expensive anyway?
From property prices, to local economies themselves – prices of of goods and services tend to be in line with local data on earnings and wealth.
These factors would affect nearly every part of the private healthcare operation anyway – from buying and running premises to hiring and retaining staff, to how much your staff’s lunch cost.
This is what markets do. Pursue income.
I agree that the fact this is not taken into consideration means that the private providers do not understand the market or markets in this case and that – more critically – this is why market solutions are actually at odds with the objective.
Which is why the bloody NHS was created in first place!!
They say that you cannot buck the market.
Well, I think that the proof in the pudding is that in actual fact, you cannot buck the public sector either.
There is a place for both – so why continue to ‘marketize’ the NHS and other public sector provision in the name of ‘efficiency’.
Why not just accept the equalising role of the NHS and other public sector provision) and simply fund it properly?
The only answer to that is that we are dealing with nothing but pure market dogma – aren’t we Wes?
The only way the private sector can make public sector services work is to essentially make slaves of the workers it will employ and use your government as its sugar-daddy.
Since Neo-liberalism’s spiritual ancestry seems to come from America’s southern slave states – we should all be aware of that (read ‘Democracy in Chains’ (2017) by Nancy MacLean).
It’s called the Waitrose effect
People still shop there…
Interestingly, Waitrose is cheaper than M&S.
I believe you.
But M&S also seems to be the home of ultra processed food and I try to avoid that. I can cook….
Being very unfortunately currently under the “care” of the NHS having broken my leg, I am all too aware of its failings. Quite apart from waiting 3 hours for an ambulance then 5 in A&E, the hospital was complete chaos. “Blind leading the blind” was the apt comment of another patient. Patient transport to get me home was almost non-existent, which resulted in having an extra night’s stay. If I listed all the mistakes that were made you wouldn’t believe me – including prescribing the wrong medicine which, as it happens, I refused to take. I am now being administed the correct one by the district nurses who, I do say, have so far been very good. They even forgot to put one medication in my discharge package and a nurse had to drop it in at my place on her way home.
Next, getting to the clinic next Wednesday is going to be challenging with my right leg in a brace. Hey Ho.
Back luck Nigel
And good luck, as well as get well soon