Lying back in a hospital ward, the procedure done and successful, a cup
of tea going down nicely with the last of the morphine, you are a
spectator to the best. By the best, I mean a glimpse of society with
none of the dogmatic histrionics of a media and political class
determined to change the way we think. That is the worst. By the best I
mean, unforgettably, the spectacle of the miners of Murton, County
Durham, emerging from the mist of a cold March morning, with the women
marching first, going back to the pit. No matter their defeat by
superior forces, they were the best.
In a hospital ward, the best
is more likely mundane, with people working routinely, listening,
responding, reassuring. Their vocabulary is not corporate-speak. Their
“productivity” is not a device of profit. Their commitment has no bottom
line, and their camaraderie is like a presence; and you become part of
it. The common thread is humanity and caring. How exotic that sounds.
Turn on the ward’s television and there is a weird other-world of
“news”, with famous dullards spinning the latest destruction of society.
There
is the mad Blair calling for an attack on Iran and the education
secretary Ed Balls peddling his dodgy diplomas, and prime minister
Gordon Brown, fresh from entertaining Rupert Murdoch and Alan Greenspan,
announcing his “return of liberty” along with his latest “reforms” that
are malignancies on the one institution that embodies liberty in
Britain: the National Health Service. None of them has the slightest
connection with the people running my ward. The divide in modern Britain
is between a society represented by those who keep the Health Service
going, and its mutation epitomised by Blair’s and Brown’s Labour
government.
In Michael Moore’s Sicko, the socialist Tony Benn
predicts a revolution in Britain if the NHS is abolished. But Britain’s
Health Service is being destroyed by attrition, and if the latest
“reforms” are not stopped, it will be too late to erect barricades. On 5
October, the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, approved a list of
fourteen companies that will advise on and take over the “commissioning”
of NHS services. They will be given influence, if not eventually
control, over which treatments patients receive and who provides them.
They are assured multimillions in profits.
They include the US
companies UnitedHealth, Aetna and Humana. These totalitarian
organisations have been repeatedly fined for their notorious role in the
American health-care system. Last year, UnitedHealth’s chief executive,
William McGuire, who was paid $125m a year, resigned following a
share-option scandal. In September, the company agreed to pay out $20m
in fines “for failures in processing claims and responding to patient
complaints”. Aetna has had to pay $120m in damages after a California
jury found it guilty of “malice, oppression and fraud”. In Sicko, a
medical reviewer for Humana is shown testifying to Congress that she
caused the death of a man by denying him care in order to save the
company money. Every year, some 18,000 Americans die because they are
denied health care or they cannot afford it.
These companies are
the Labour government’s friends. Simon Stevens, Blair’s former health
policy adviser, is now a CEO at UnitedHealth. Julian Le Grand, writing
in the Guardian as a distinguished professor, gives his learned approval
to the “reforms” – he, too, was Blair’s adviser.
In Manchester,
other “reforms” are well on the way to destroying NHS services for the
mentally ill. William Scott committed suicide after losing the support
of an NHS worker who had cared for him for eight years. What all this
means is that the NHS is being softened up for privatisation by stealth.
This is the undeclared policy of the Brown government, whose rapacious
actions abroad are mirrored at home. It was Brown as treasuer who
promoted the disastrous “private finance initiative” as a device to
build new hospitals, while handing huge profits to favoured companies.
As a result, the NHS is being bled by £700m a year. This has caused a
wholly unnecessary “financial crisis” that is the catch-22 rationale for
allowing more profiteers to take over what was a former Labour
government’s greatest achievement. Will we allow them to get away with
it?
