PRIVATE HOSPITAL GET MEGA-BAILOUT FROM THE NHS

Morning Star - When talking about the danger of NHS privatisation, we should remember how much NHS privatisation has already taken place. Both “New” Labour and Tory ministers had a simple but crude way of hiding NHS privatisation: they treated the NHS as a “brand” and stuck the big blue-and-white NHS logo on the front of private health companies. So many operations people think are run by the publicly owned National Health Service are actually handed over to private firms. This simple trick worked so well on politics that you find out more about it by looking through company accounts than parliamentary debates. Take the latest accounts of Ramsay Healthcare UK, published at the start of September. It is the British arm of an Australian-based firm that calls itself “one of the largest and most diverse private healthcare companies in the world.” It is pretty big in Britain. Ramsay UK had a £502.9 million turnover in 2019...>>>