The Tories and now Labour are pushing through Simon Stevens’s NHS plan – and Labour are going further still
Former NHS England CEO Simon Stevens was a top executive at the US corporation UnitedHealth, one of the most hated US health privateers – and a senior adviser to former Labour PM Tony Blair – before his appointment by the Tories to run the NHS ‘five year forward view’ of privatisation, fragmentation and £22bn cuts dressed as ‘efficiency savings’.
In this guest article, author and retired GP Paul Hobday explains why he considers Stevens to be ‘NHS public enemy number one’:
NHS PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE
When the Conservative Coalition Government appointed Simon Laurence Stevens Chief Executive of NHS England in 2014 it knew it was ushering the fox into the henhouse. It was a key part of the covert plan to Americanise the NHS and Stevens was a key player.
By 2021 when the now Lord Stevens left the role his job was done. The Health and Care Act received Royal Assent nine months later which furthered the corporate hijacking and profit-orientated power grab by splitting the NHS up into 42 Integrated Care Systems (ICS). A core part of Stevens’s 2019 NHS Long Term Plan, ICS are based on American Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs) and are partnerships that incorporate independent care providers. With the ICS role being both purchaser and provider these are cash-limited bodies which no longer have a statutory duty to provide secondary care.
With the abolition of NHS England their brakes have been taken off to accelerate commercialisation and privatisation. The so-called independent sector is no such thing. It is very much dependent on the NHS and siphons taxpayers’ money to its shareholders. The four decades long clandestine neo-liberal plot to dismantle the NHS to the benefit of multinational corporations which will cost lives is nearing its completion.
With the approval of most Parliamentarians regardless of party, Stevens has been the principle architect of selling off the NHS with the incredulous and reckless aim of metamorphosing to a US-style healthcare system with its appalling ranking, inefficiency, unethical and immoral behaviour, fraud and corruption.
Many politicians are professional liars and there has been no greater false platitude and deliberate deception than the declaration that the NHS is safe with them. In the 77 years of the existence of the NHS, probably no more than seven of those years have we had Governments in control that were committed to Nye Bevan’s founding principles. The neoliberals who have been in power since 1979 are responsible for the state of the NHS today and they have needed “benign” characters like Stevens – a sheep in wolf’s clothing – to further their cause.
Who better than a man who served as a senior government policy adviser for seven years from 1997 to 2004 under New Labour, then for ten years worked as senior executive at the American UnitedHealth rising to President of Global Expansion ? The title says it all. He slotted nicely back into the NHS under the Conservative Government after that to continue his work.
In 2010 at the end of 13 years of New Labour the Commonwealth Fund put the NHS top for efficiency with the U.S. healthcare system last in overall rankings. But don’t be fooled into thinking the NHS was any safer under that administration. The salami-slicing of Bevan’s principles carried on apace throughout. Blair and Brown just funded it better but the marketisation and dismantling – always called reorganisation and modernisation – continued.
So who in their right mind would want to transform the UK healthcare system – the best – into an American system – the worst ? The answer is so audaciously straight forward and temeritous in its simplicity : those who could get extremely rich from such a change as well as the private insurance companies like UnitedHealth which dominate healthcare in the USA. Now they have moved in to take over the publicly funded sector the US market is saturated so they are looking for other business ventures and what better than the untapped well of the NHS ? The vultures see the NHS as a very lucrative opportunity and so does Trump. UnitedHealth, Optum, Centene, Operose, Spire, Circle, Ramsey, Virgin & HCA are among the 250 private healthcare companies already profiting from the NHS, providing 2,495 services costing £29 billion and managed through 53,000 individual contracts.
In my dystopian novel The Deceit Syndrome an experienced GP wakes up to the ideological clandestine plot to commercialise healthcare which will make a few extremely rich but cost lives. But the conspiracy is not fiction. Chapter 18 runs through the steps necessary to achieve their goal so that the public are seduced into believing there is no alternative. In the real world the connivers knew it would be electoral suicide to try to transform the NHS into an insurance-based system in a single leap, but it could be achieved in covert underhand surreptitious small steps. In The Deceit Syndrome a civil servant called Sir Roland Henderson pushes this through like Simon Stevens.
Now the arsonist’s torch has been passed to the 36th Secretary of Health of the NHS, Wesley Paul William Streeting, who, like many of his predecessors, has taken £166,575 in donations from people or companies linked to the private healthcare sector. He continues with policies benefitting the multinationals and his bosses in the City of London.
Little will be done to solve the real NHS problems. Social care reform has been outrageously delayed again and the delusion that Artificial Intelligence will revolutionise the NHS is the proverbial “dead cat being thrown on the table”. The politicians dance the usual charade of just arguing about funding, deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room that they know is there and hope the public won’t wake up to. The commercial, market, privatisation American elephant. The ICS will deliver cuts and savings meaning operations and care will be refused when their budget is spent. They have no duty to provide secondary care anymore. More people will self-fund or take out insurance in the self-deception that this will protect them and their families. To their cost in more ways than one they will find out the insurance companies will avoid paying up just like with car, house or travel insurance. “Delay, deny and then die” is their motto in America. But the two-tier service will have arrived.
Stevens’ record in charge was, in my opinion, one of consistent failure masked by the rhetoric of grand impractical plans few of which have been more than partially carried through. Much of this was a smokescreen. From the neoliberal point of view it has been a success and they have achieved their goals of breaking up the NHS.
The words “National” and “Service” are no longer appropriate in the acronym “NHS”.
All of the 1948 fundamental beliefs and values have been either diluted or jettisoned. The NHS is no longer universal or comprehensive with rationing, some procedures unavailable and postcode variable care. It is certainly not publicly provided with vast swathes of services outsourced or privatised. Recent midwifery and other scandals prove it is no longer publicly accountable. And there are services patients now have to pay for exposing free at the point of need as a forlorn dream. The introduction of compulsory insurance which has been considered by several governments in secret would abolish funding through general taxation, and is now just one step away. When they re-ignite the disingenuous crass and totally flawed argument that the nation can no longer afford the NHS, the American system will have arrived.
This is what Simon Stevens achieved and why he was the NHS’s public enemy number one.
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Simon Laurence Stevens is an idiot, a ‘useful idiot’ to the predators that need to disable and then take over the NHS and extract gold from Them-There (NHS trust) Hills.
Each NHS Trust is a legal entity set up by the Secretary of State under the National Health Service Act 2006 solely to provide goods and services for the purposes of the greater public health syste,. Left to themselves, the 229bNHS Trusts in England and Wales would achieve their objectives and the system would function without any capital-extraction and market competition.
Capitalism needs to change this: A fox in the chicken house courtesy of Mssrs Keir Rodney Starmer, Wesley Paul William Streeting and predecessors. PERFECT!
There’s Gold in them there hills – and your pension requires that we extract it. EVERY LAST PENNY, slurp slurp.
FWIW Dr Paul’s book, A NOVEL, “The Deceit Syndome: Catch 69” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deceit-Syndrome-Catch-69/dp/190734022X is a great read. Tells us more about Streeting and Starmer (and Andrew Lansley, et al) than fiction ever should.
“Rob Baigent is an experienced NHS GP – the only job he ever wanted. Becoming more and more alarmed about the extra misery and sickness he sees on a daily basis, his concern turns to anger when he realises this is a direct result of Government policy. His patients are suffering and his beloved NHS is being dismantled by political zealots.
“An ideology has been dictating all our lives for decades, but few have even heard of it. Even fewer could explain it. Most have been brainwashed that it is the only way. Neo-liberalism has taken over the world. Imposed dishonestly, undemocratically and by stealth it affects every part of our lives from cradle to grave. Where and how we are born, educated, work, play, consume and die. Even the afterlife has been privatised.
“Rob now understands the long-term clandestine plan to commercialise healthcare so that a small group can make their fortunes. Why can’t others see it? Friends and colleagues ridicule his protests. Even his new wife thinks he is a little paranoid. But the more he looks into it the more he grasps that the plan goes far beyond his NHS.
“There is a sinister Establishment plot for big business, mainly from the USA, to take over literally everything – including Government. It will be irreversible. Hobday is amazed to learn the elite and the appeasers before the war sowed the first seeds. Rob realises these people will go to any length to change the world to their advantage.
“But who are they? Who can he trust? Why is he being threatened? He begins to fear for his own safety. Nothing is to be allowed to get in the way of this revolution. Most of the scandals in Rob’s lifetime seem to be linked. They all begin to make sense and fit together.
“Will the world wake up in time or will evil prevail? Can he help turn the tide against the forces of the establishment or will he go under first?”
The Deceit Syndrome – a story of everyday life, death and deceit in the NHS.
Aneurin “Nye” Bevan would be turning in his grave…
Number of people each year who go bankrupt due to healthcare costs:
USA 500,000.
UK 0.
Cost of major heart surgery:
USA $200,000.
UK 0.
USA HEAL THYSELF.
I used to teach in a very large primary school (730 pupils) on the most notorious estate in a northern industrial town. One of my colleagues there was a peripatetic Headteacher who would be put into a school that otherwise had no Headteacher, and when not needed for that role he “returned to base” at our school. In those days, teachers were solely responsible for the curriculum and methodology used in schools which were desperate for cash even for the basics. Despite that, virtually all primary-aged children liked going to school even in such neglected areas as ours. And despite that most of them succeeded one way or another.
The colleague I mentioned above said “Don’t EVER allow politicians to gain control of what happens in schools, as things will become much worse.” I can’t give an exact date, but it was roughly 1978, and probably because Callaghan was promoting his “Big conversation.” So within a few years, we had the imposed national curriculum (a cock-up of major proportions that was “set in stone,” but changed three times in as many years….) We had the privatisation of schools as in Grant-Maintained Schools, where the major “advantage” for senior staff was that they could gouge out a massive salary for themselves … and did! Blair continued though he renamed GM Schools as Academies, and fooled 99.9% of the commentariat. Of course as the politicians couldn’t be seen to fail in their imposition of their own ideas, they flooded schools with money (True!), but also with Ofsted, just to make sure you were “Only following orders!”
Now with all this political interference, where have we ended up? Schools where vast numbers of children hate school and don’t attend, an unbelievable number of SEND pupils, fractured administration of schools, Ofsted a complete farce, and tests, tests, tests, to test the testable and if you can spoonfeed your pupils the answers, then you are a success!
Streeting and Co wish to continue this “improvement” (sarcasm) into the NHS.
May I repeat and adapt my colleague’s words from about 57 years ago….. Don’t let politicians get their claws into the NHS! They’ll flood it with taxpayer cash and hand it over to insatiable private equity and we know that Blackrock, Starmer’s favoured vultures will be right in there!