23.05.1996

The healthcare we need

A devastating indictment of how NHS hospitals are being driven to bankruptcy and closure was revealed last week.

At a press conference organised by the British Medical Association doctors described how their departments are being driven “to the brink” by government policies. Well over 300 NHS hospitals have been closed down since the Tories implemented their so-called ‘market’ policies in 1991.

The idea was supposed to be that hospitals would provide a cheaper, more efficient service if they were run on cost-accounting lines. Health authorities and family doctors would be able to buy treatment at the lowest rate on offer from competing hospitals. NHS patients have no say in this, of course: they just have to go where they are sent.

The most ‘efficient’ hospitals are supposed to attract the most patients and so bring in more cash. But there is one drawback: NHS rules prevent them from spending any surplus on improving treatment; instead they must reduce their charges every year, as well as making savings of three percent annually. The only way they can do this is by ‘treating’ more and more patients.

Top neurosurgeon Christopher Adams said, “It got to the stage where we were churning out patients so fast it became dangerous.” That does however allow the Tories to claim that waiting lists are being ‘cut’ and things are getting ‘better’.

Last year Adams described how health service managers were getting round the rules in a different way - by refusing to treat patients at all. They ordered surgeons to work more slowly to make their budgets last the whole year.

But these are not just badly drafted rules. Despite their denials, politicians from all the main parties now agree that we cannot ‘afford’ a health service any more. If you want to ensure decent treatment, they say, then go private - if you can afford it. Tories, Labour and the Liberals all agree that you should ‘make your own arrangements’ by taking out private insurance and letting the NHS quietly fade away.

But it is not modern society that can no longer provide the healthcare we need; it is this rotten capitalist system, where making money comes first.

That is why the Unemployed Workers Charter is out on the streets campaigning for the health service we need, not what the bosses say they can afford to give us.

Alan Fox