The NHS was launched, three years after the end of World War ii, when there was absolutely no money. So, we absolutely can afford an NHS now. Our universal, comprehensive NHS with service based on clinical need and not ability to pay for medical treatment, pooling risk is a shining example of socialism in action. Our NHS has been a national asset, a symbol of our shared humanity, a collective desire to care for each other, to alleviate suffering, and to build a healthier and compassionate society. However, years of ‘reforms’ imposed by successive governments have fragmented, disorganised, and demoralised the NHS, undermining its principles, to make room for private profit in place of the focus on patient care.
Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) was established in 2005 as a non-partisan, political campaigning organisation, fighting to save and reinstate the founding values of the NHS.
KONP opposed New Labour’s shift towards privatisation, the extortionate PFI hospital builds and the disruptive, heavily subsidised independent sector, that is, private treatment centres (ISTC}, which were supposed to address long waiting lists which have returned to haunt us today.
Since 2010 the NHS has suffered a double onslaught of defunding under Conservative austerity with increasing fragmentation and privatisation. This new Labour government is no long-awaited panacea and no different.
Consequences
Keep Our NHS Public has repeatedly called for an end to privatisation and outsourcing of services in all its forms and the consequences are outrageous:
- Last year 20% of all deaths in England and Wales were avoidable deaths, preventable with appropriate healthcare (ONS). That’s 126,000 preventable deaths abd 126,000 families in unnecessary mourning.
- 7.5 million patients – 1 in 7 – are currently on waiting lists for NHS care and many die waiting
- With 2.5 hospital beds per thousand patients the UK has the second lowest number among 24 European countries, the average being 5
- During the Conservative years, there was a reduction of 25% in mental health beds. meaning patients travelling hundreds of miles to be treated in acute psychiatric wards. Most psychiatric hospital care is provided by the private sector
- There are 112,000 NHS staff vacancies in England alone, including desperate shortages in non-clinical roles such as porters, cleaners, 999 call handlers
- 165,000 social care vacancies creates NHS bed blocking with no onward housing for the elderly well
- We have 2.9 doctors per thousand population, the second lowest amount in Europe, compared with 5.9 in Portugal, 4.4 in both Germany and Spain
- Dentistry is in a dire state; many are unable to see a dentist and dental health in children is the primary emergency admission to A&E
Funding – public or private?
The NHS cannot flourish while social care remains in crisis. One in seven patients is stuck in hospital due to lack of social care. Shame lies with every politician who has broken electioneering promises to fix the care system.
If the NHS had received comparable per capita funding to France and Germany it would have received a minimum of £40 billion transformative funding a year, addressing staffing shortages, reducing waiting times, and improving infrastructure.
The current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves is committing an extra £22.6 billion for the NHS over two years. This is inadequate and more concerning still, is mostly earmarked for the private sector. Public money bandaged and washed back to rich.
Major sections of the NHS are no longer publicly provided although they carry the NHS logo. Contracts to the private sector weaken the compartmentalised, public whole NHS.
Commercial confidentiality prevents public scrutiny. Private hospitals cherry-pick low-risk patients but are often unsafe with most having no Intensive Care Unit and poor if any out-of-hours cover. Profiteering costs lives.
We Own It, a public ownership campaign organisation, found that between January 2012 and May 2024, approximately £6.7 billion – equivalent to £10 million per week – was directed towards private profits from NHS contracts.
The additional administrative burden associated with outsourcing costs the NHS over £4.5 billion annually, and research from Oxford University shows that outsourcing has led to 557 excess deaths.
Years of denying funds to the NHS and repeated failures to address its growing workforce crisis have left it with too few staff, too little equipment, and too many outdated crumbling buildings.
NHS doctors and nurses are exhausted. Morale is at rock bottom.
Wes Streeting says the NHS is broken, and there should be greater involvement of the private sector. But it was entirely sustainable before the private sector started looting it.
When politicians say, ‘we can’t just throw money at the NHS’, they mean ‘we want to throw money at BUPA and Nuffield instead’.
To be clear, it is not the NHS model failing. It is successive governments that have failed the NHS.
A return to the founding principles of the NHS
Keep Our NHS Public argues for a return to an NHS based on its founding principles of universal comprehensive care from cradle to grave, free at the point of need, publicly provided, and accountable decisions based on clinical need, not profit, funded through progressive general taxation.
Of course, the tax system needs urgent change to tax the rich more and tax all that pandemic profit and corporate greed.
The UK is the 6th richest economy in the world, but the money is in the hands of the 1% who own 57% of the wealth. Their wealth buys their health.
We know that with political will and a redirection of funding from hedge funds to the people, the NHS can be restored.
Health is an asset which, together with improvements in social and economic conditions, shapes the economic health of the nation.
Healthcare is a human right. Access to free healthcare is a right we want to be available for our children and our grandchildren and in perpetuity.
Saving our NHS is everyone’s fight. We can afford it and we can’t afford to lose it. We must all act now, stand up and defend what is ours.
Yes, we can afford it – there’s always plenty of money for wars.
Take up arms and sign up today
