But I've just realised the outcome of "privatising" the NHS is not going to be loads of independent surgeries and hospitals all competing openly and honestly, driving down costs and improving the experience of healthcare for everyone; it's much more likely to be like public transport, with large, bureaucratic corporate companies gobbling up regions of healthcare and providing de facto (or even worse, de jure) monopolies in each area.
It's a measure of just how useless government is and how reluctant it is to relinquish control of anything that the only model they have for privatisation is to farm the services out to a couple of their mates so that it's easy to "nudge" them in the "right" direction, rather than opening things up to the market and leaving them to sort themselves out. This despite the repeated and rather obvious failure of the model to provide any cost savings or a genuine improvement in service.
We might as well save ourselves the inevitable arse raping (without lube) that is going to happen, since government won't actually privatise the service, but rather just outsource it.
I can't really tell the difference between fascism and modern corporatism.
Can you?
4 comments:
Depressingly true.
That would be unavoidable if, like public transport, commissioning were to be done by central or local government which would want to minimise its procurement and contract management load by letting only large contracts for a whole region.
The structure of local commissioning of healthcare doesn't have to be like that. Unfortunately, the commissioning bodies and GPs seem not to be keen on doing the work so they too will end up in consortia much like the PCTs they replace.
Corporatism and Fascism...
To coin an often used phrase - "Two cheeks of the same arse"
Britain destroyed by nationalisation its mixed system of healthcare providers and will struggle to recreate it. Yes, it probably will end up being a oligopoly of the usual corporate state favourites.
The rock that goes with that hard place is that the NHS cannot continue as it is.
How bad does it have to get before the general population decide it is worth the risk of change?
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