Streeting appoints health privatiser to oversee 10-year NHS slash-and-burn plan

Health Secretary who has threatened to let NHS die if he doesn’t get his way with it appoints former health privatiser partner to draft implementation plan

Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary who said he’ll let the NHS die if the UK people don’t accept his ‘reforms’, has appointed a closure advocate who used to work for McKinsey – one of the key firms behind the Tories’ assault on the NHS – to formalise the implementation of a ‘ten-year plan’ of cuts, closures and privatisation.

Streeting has appointed Tom Kibasi, who has boasted that he ‘helped elect’ Starmer and ‘spent many years’ at McKinsey, chairs three NHS trusts in north-west London and ‘also works in health investment’, according to Health Service Journal, as a senior adviser to put together the so-called ’10-year health plan’ based on last year’s ‘Darzi report’, which Kibasi also wrote for Tory health policy enthusiast Lord Darzi. According to the Department of Health and Social Care, Kibasi will:

provide expert advice and support to the health and social care secretary’s reform agenda, including drafting the government’s 10-year health plan.

HSJ understands the health and social care secretary asked Mr Kibasi to draft the document, which is due to be published in the spring, after being impressed with his work on Lord Darzi’s investigation of NHS performance.

Darzi ‘lavished praise’ on the health policy of recent Conservative governments and his/Kibasi’s report is a continuation of the Tories’ ideological programme of cuts, hospital closures and NHS privatisation. In her analysis of his report last year for the Morning Star, former Labour and independent MP Claudia Webbe – one of the very few to speak out on the privatisation and rationing scam of ‘Integrated Care’ and the use of non-doctor ‘associates’ to replace real doctors that forms part of it despite the danger Labour knows it poses to patients, especially the poor – wrote:

It seems clear that the new Labour government intends to start where the Tories left off and bleed even more services out of hospitals. The old adage about insanity involving doing the same thing and expecting different results would apply, but only if we assume that the intent is actually to make things better rather than to enhance profitability.

Darzi’s report furnishes Starmer’s government with the excuses it needs in order to do this, and this bodes extremely ill for those who rely on the services of the classic NHS that was rightly considered one of the world’s best and most efficient healthcare services.

Claudia Webbe.

McKinsey, where Kibasi ‘spent many years’, was placed ‘at the heart of the NHS’ by the Tories as soon as they got back into power in 2010, but had been influencing UK NHS policy for years under ‘Labour’ PM Tony Blair. In 2010, it authored a ‘restricted’ report – banned from release to anyone outside a select group, later stored quietly on a public-facing server without a link to it on the index page then removed after Skwawkbox brought it to public attention in 2013 but still available in archived form – that portrayed its grim vision of the future of the NHS.

In that paper, McKinsey said that ending the principle of the NHS as ‘free at the point of delivery’ probably ‘need[s] to be considered’:

In addition to the opportunities to improve productivity and quality identified above, there may be additional ways to reduce required funding without damaging quality by making regionally- and/or nationally-led changes to income and costs. Such changes would require decisions by political leaders and challenge the principle that the NHS is free at the point of delivery. However, the content suggests that such options may need to be considered…

…In addition to this, other co-payments such as are used in other European countries – or beyond that – could potentially be introduced, if there was need and will. For example, people could pay for attending A&E (as in Republic of Ireland); for access to primary care (as in Germany); for inpatient stays (as in France).

The report also recommends other opportunities to cut costs, such as reducing the number of consultant specialist doctors and overall NHS staff numbers, before going on to talk about other measures to reduce spending:

We would need to restrict access to services and treatments, for example by:

– Enforcing tougher eligibility criteria for treatments, e.g., hip replacements only for the over 80s, social care packages only for the acutely-ill, asking people who need it to buy their own equipment
– Introducing means-testing, i.e., making people pay for care if they can afford to
– Denying treatments that are high cost per Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY), e.g., high-cost end of life treatments such as chemotherapy
– Reducing funding of services seen as ‘non-core’, e.g., voluntary and community groups – which currently substitute and/or prevent need for statutory care.

Such actions would ..involve further bed closures and workforce reductions

The 2024 ‘Darzi Report’ commissioned by Wes Streeting – who has taken large donations from private health interests – for which Kibasi claims credit, is a blueprint for widespread cuts, the closure of hospitals, expanded privatisation of services, rationing of treatment, withholding of face-to-face care and the coercion of the public into measures the government decides will cut costs. As Skwawkbox noted on its publication, it:

prioritises profit – framed as ‘cost-effectiveness’ and ‘finances’ – above care, foresees the closure of more hospitals to push what remains of care out away from them, and prescribes a continuation of the policies that created the NHS crisis as the solution to them.

These measures are a continuation of the same programme of cuts, closures and rationing that have been going on for years – before and during the recent Tory government era – under the headline of so-called ‘Integrated Care’, which was originally ‘Accountable Care’ but rebranded after people began to realise that the US ‘Accountable Care’ it is based on is a corporate scam for withholding treatment and increasing profits.

But the principles didn’t change with the rebranding – and Streeting and his boss Starmer, who have both admitted and even boasted that they intend to extend privatisation and have taken large donations from private health donors, have said they are committed not just to continuing ‘Integrated Care’ but to going even further. Labour’s health influencers even advocate a requirement for patients to treat themselves:

Now Streeting has appointed the architect of the slash-and-burn plan to ‘draft’ its implementation over the next decade. Be very afraid – but don’t let fear prevent you from being loud about what is happening and resisting it.

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