West End Extra - Letters to the Editor: Bankers dreaming of an NHS without patients

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West End Extra - FORUM: Opinion in the WEE
Published: 2 November 2007

Bankers dreaming of an NHS without patients

• I DID not know whether to laugh or cry on reading that St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, has had to launch a “life-saving task force” in order to give patients a fighting chance of surviving a visit.
And recent news that ministers and officials have decided to hire “health providers” who have been hounded out of the United States for corruption (which must take some doing) to fleece what is left of the billions that has been poured into – and straight back out of – the NHS is far from reassuring.
Surely our own management consultants, accountants, corporate lawyers and merchant bankers are doing a perfectly satisfactory job of draining the health budget under the disastrous PFI schemes by which it is presently funded; or, more accurately, placed into terminal debt. Why do we need disgraced American companies (who surely know an easy touch when they see one) to come over and hoover up what’s left?
It seems the ideal health service, as far as financiers are concerned, is one from which patients and medics are removed altogether and bankers and their associates simply divvy up the budget amongst themselves. Recent culls such as the 90 deaths in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells indicate that they may have already thought of this.
Furthermore, why not also sideline the Chancellor of the Exchequer and simply pay our taxes directly to the unholy slew of management consultants and merchant bankers who are going to get it anyway?
They could give us their
tax-haven bank account numbers and we could deposit our money directly with them and skip the half-hearted pretence about the NHS altogether.
We are being robbed blind by these people and will continue to be so for the thirty year duration of the contracts – ie long after the jerry-built tat that has been provided falls to bits and needs replacing. Thus a First World country has wasted eye-watering amounts of money providing a Third World health service.
The only mystery here is whether our financial representatives who sign-off all this are suicidally naive or deploying stupidity as a front for their own corruption.
If Gordon Brown and his henchmen think this Enron-style catastrophe is not going to come back and bite them they are even more delusional than we had imagined.
Martin Kennedy
Brewer Street, W1

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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