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.
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