The likes of Laura Kuessnberg and Robert Peston love scandals, it's all they report on. But they barely say a word about maybe the biggest scandal of all, the privatisation of the NHS, which is doing serious damage to the health service as £Billions that should be going to fund nurses salaries, to pay for hospital beds and to run clinics - instead is going to private companies.
When I went to A&E recently
after an infection got out of control I saw the incredible pressure
that the hospital reception staff are under and how that affected me and
the other patients in need of care. Frankly, it was horrific and I felt
like I was in a poor 3rd world country but I was not, I was in Britain,
a rich country but one which that has suffered from years of brutal
Neo-Liberal policies.
As a result of the poverty pay and over
exhausting working conditions many nurses have left the profession and
now there is a shortage of 10,000s of nurses across the country.
Furthermore,
due to the cut in the nurses' bursary under Jeremy Hunt, many who'd
like to train to be a nurse simply cannot afford it as they'd need to
take out loans while a student nurse meaning they'd end up in debt which
is a debt that due to the poverty pay they'd struggle to be free from.
Yet while this is happening private companies are sucking out £Billions from the NHS.
A
lot of the propaganda back in the day was that allowing the private
sector to run services would make those services more efficiently
especially as privatisation would cut all that bureaucratic waste that
Big Government tends to have.
However, with NHS privatisation
the opposite is the case. Frank Dobson who was briefly the Health
Secretary from 1997 to 1999 said that the NHS used to spend 4% of its
budget on bureaucracy but now due to extra privatisation the health
service spends something like 12% to 15% on bureaucracy.
With a
Neo-Liberal Government in charge and an opposition not interested in
opposing that percentage spent on bureaucracy could go a lot higher than
15% as more and more privatisation comes into the health service.
The annual budget for the NHS is over £100bn so those extra percentage points wasted by the private sector could be funding so many NHS services we all need as well as to give NHS staff a fair salary.
One
of the reasons for the private sector being inefficient is its
corporate style of management. Private Companies run services with
executives, directors and consultants who of course require a large
salary.
David Graeber in his book "Bullshit Jobs" talks about this in detail and how the Private Sector has layers of bureaucrats doing jobs that provide nothing in terms of actual service but require large amounts of money to fund.
Private companies of course
want to make a profit and when NHS services are privatised there are
often not just one company involved but many. Each cut that each company
takes adds up to massive sums of money wasted.
Tory MPs like
James Cleverly and Sajid Javid say we cannot afford the rise in nurses'
salaries that the RCN (Royal College of nursing) ask for but these very
same MPs are happy for the money to be wasted on the private sector.
This
really is a scandal that the general public need to know about yet if
you look at Laura Kuessenberg's Twitter feed there is nothing about this
and when she is on the TV she ignores it all. It confirms what Noam
Chomsky says that the media are not interested in informing the public
rather only interested in Manufacturing Consent.
