Health privatisers’ nightmare vision for 2040 NHS co-created by man running Streeting’s ’10yr plan’

Davos document ‘Vision of England’s Health System in 2040’ by McKinsey, scandal-ridden UnitedHealth and others lays out nightmarish end for the NHS

As Skwawkbox has previously reported, Keir Starmer’s right-wing Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting has appointed Tom Kibasi to oversee the 10-year NHS slash-and-burn ‘Darzi Report’ that Kibasi played a key role in writing for Streeting. The report is full of praise for the Tory NHS policies that have brought the NHS to near-collapse and recommends much more of the same, including hospital closures and and rationing of treatment under the so-called ‘integrated care’ programme cuts, closures and privatisation – a corporate scam for withholding treatment and maximising profit.

Kibasi was, for at least 7.5 years and by some reports over a decade, a healthcare partner in McKinsey, one of the notorious health-privatiser firms placed at the heart of the NHS for decades by successive privatisation-friendly UK governments and has claimed credit for privatisation enthusiast Lord Darzi’s 2024 report.

But Kibasi’s involvement in the ending of the NHS as a true national health service goes back much further – including the end of treatment ‘free at the point of need’ – a concept that McKinsey has long undermined. A 2013 paper presented at billionaire’s playground Davos, titled ‘Sustainable Health Systems/Visions, Strategies, Critical Uncertainties and Scenarios’ contains sections envisaging how the health systems of various countries will look in 2040, now just fifteen years away.

And the section titled ‘Vision of England’s Health System in 2040’ lays out McKinsey’s view of how the no-longer-national and no-longer-free health service will serve the interests of privatisers, dressed up in the usual privatisation-advocate’s language of improvement and ‘access and equity’. It recommends:

• the replacement of free-at-the-point-of-need care by a system of co-payments similar to the US system that is that nation’s leading cause of bankruptcy
• making each person ‘responsible’ for their health, with all the implications of punishment and withheld treatment for those who ‘fail’ that that entails – a development that Streeting has flagged with his planned coercion of millions of patients considered overweight to take dangerous weight-loss drugs made by a US company with a string of prosecutions and lawsuits in its wake.
• only a few hospitals remaining as ‘centres of excellence’ while ‘diagnosis, treatment and monitoring’ are done at home
• ‘remote diagnosis’ of conditions – little or no face to face interactions with doctors who can actually examine patients
• treatment decisions based on ‘value’ and ‘cost’
• making the ‘NHS’ a profit-centre for treating patients from around the world
• making people instead of health professionals care for themselves and their neighbours – an outcome already flagged by health privatisers invited to Labour’s 2024 annual party conference (see image above)
• yet more privatisation to create supposed ‘competition’

In full, it reads:

Vision of England’s Health System in 2040

Our national health win be a bastion of our values of access and equity. Healthcare delivery models will be ever changing and dynamic, and will test, celebrate and rely upon innovation. The primary locus of care will be the home, powered by technology and remote diagnosis, treatment and monitoring.

Hospitals will be highly specialized “centres of excellence”, funnelling highly skilled professionals, resources and patients to build the expertise and training opportunities that will push the frontiers of medical knowledge.

Our patients win have genuine choice. This will be based on full information on the value of a treatment compared with the cost. Patients will track results from providers, developing an important understanding of which deliver the best care with the most consistency. We will be a hub for innovation in medical technology, fuelled by centres of excellence that will draw admiration and patients from across Europe and beyond.

Our citizens will be empowered and informed to cultivate a focus on wellness and prevention:  They will be responsible to themselves and their communities for their health decisions and Iifestyles, sharing some of the cost of their elective care and supporting families and neighbours in their health. There will be a clear cultural emphasis on wellness and on care for patients that includes their care for one another.

Investments and decisions will be driven by value and data. Our health sector will be known for its transparency on results and value, which will reduce the variability of outcomes. This visibility will generate a competitive and innovative delivery sector.

And among the senior players – the only partner in the firm – involved in the preparation of this Davos document? None other than Wes Streeting’s ’10-year plan’/Darzi guru, Tom Kibasi:

The 2013 report may have been down to Kibasi, but it was far from McKinsey’s first NHS privatisation rodeo. In 2010, the firm authored a report for the NHS in Northern Ireland, the firm recommended the ending of treatment ‘free at the point of delivery’, instead proposing rationing, paid-for treatment and cuts:

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

To make sure that none of the NHS managers mistook its meaning, McKinsey was explicit:

Such changes would reguire 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. We could generate revenue through co-payment by the service user

and recommended that patients be charged for attending Accident and Emergency and for primary care.

Both Streeting and Starmer have accepted large donations from private health interests and have boasted that they intend to accelerate privatisation. Now it seems ever clearer that the fox has been put well and truly in charge of the NHS chicken coop.

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