{"id":24194,"date":"2014-02-26T08:44:54","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T08:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=24194"},"modified":"2014-02-26T10:29:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T10:29:49","slug":"another-5-billion-of-nhs-privatisation-is-now-happening-with-the-aim-of-privatising-most-of-the-rest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2014\/02\/26\/another-5-billion-of-nhs-privatisation-is-now-happening-with-the-aim-of-privatising-most-of-the-rest\/","title":{"rendered":"Another \u00c2\u00a35 billion of NHS privatisation is now happening – with the aim of privatising most of the rest"},"content":{"rendered":"

The FT reports this morning that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The NHS has for the first time asked the private sector to help purchase billions of pounds worth of services for hospitals and GPs.<\/p>\n

NHS England on Tuesday advertised for companies to compete for work worth at least \u00a35bn advising the new doctor-led clinical commissioning groups, which spend more than two-thirds of the NHS budget buying care for patients.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me break those statements down.<\/p>\n

First, let's consider the farce of it costing \u00a35 billion to support GPs make decisions. The whole of the GP service in the UK costs about \u00a312.5 billion (9% approximately of the total \u00a3137 bn spend). So we're now going to spend a sum equivalent to 40% of that supporting buying decisions by GPs over 5 years?<\/p>\n

That does not make sense on any level. Firstly, because in that case GPs are clearly not in charge of this activity in that case; the sheer scale of it suggests that they can't be. And secondly the immediate thought is, surely this could be better spent?<\/p>\n

Second, the purpose of this spend is to\u00a0\u201ccreate a competitive market in the buying of healthcare services\". In other words, this is \u00a35 billion to take money out of the NHS and into the private sector.<\/p>\n

This is the privatisation agenda that the government has always denied exists written large all over the future of healthcare in this country.<\/p>\n

NB Updated to make clear the spend was over 5 years at 10.30 am 26.2.14<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The FT reports this morning that: The NHS has for the first time asked the private sector to help purchase billions of pounds worth of
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nhs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}