Lees, E. (2020, March 30). Profiting from crisis. New Internationalist. Retrieved from https://newint.

org
/features/2020/03/30/profiting-crisis

PROFITING FROM CRISIS

By Ellen Lees (https://newint.org/author/Ellen+Lees)

30 March 2020 Health (/topic/Health) austerity (/topic/austerity)

The UK’s coronavirus healthcare policy exposes the farce

at the core of the privatization project, writes Ellen Lees
of We Own It.
 The Guardian revealed that in 2017, the Department of Health had dismissed

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/advice-on-protective-gear-
for-nhs-staff-was-rejected-owing-to-cost)
high-level medical advice about providing NHS workers with protective equipment during an influenza pandemic,
on the grounds that stockpiling it would be too expensive.
REUTERS/Hannah McKay

The coronavirus crisis (https://newint.org/features/2020/03/16/covid-19-

who-gets-it) has shaken the world, threatening millions of lives and
posing the biggest challenge to public health in a generation. 

On the face of it, it also appears to have torn up the economic

orthodoxy of the past 40 years. The UK government seems to have
abandoned the ‘market knows best’ approach in favour of state
intervention.

After a decade of austerity, cuts and privatization, have the

Conservatives grasped that the free market can’t serve all of society’s
needs? The reality is a little different. 

Take the railways. If you were just to read the headlines, you might
think that, with passenger numbers plummeting, the government had
ended the 25-year experiment of privatization and ‘effectively
nationalized (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/covid-19-
government-suspends-rail-franchise-agreements)’ the railways.

That’s not quite the case.

The government isn’t taking over the railways. Instead, the existing
private operators will continue to run them and will be paid a fee to
do so. In practice, this means little change. The likes of CrossCountry,
First and Abellio will still be running trains. The only difference is that
the government is guaranteeing their income for as long as the
coronavirus crisis continues.

Far from bringing the

railways into public hands,
this merely reveals the farce
at the core of the privatization
‘ When business is good,
private companies rake in the
profits. When business is bad,
project. When business is
good, private companies rake the government steps in and
in the profits. When business pays the private companies to
is bad, the government steps continue
in and pays the private
companies to continue. As so
often the case with privatized public services – profits are privatized,
while losses are nationalized.

As in rail, so too in healthcare. With the Covid-19 emergency

escalating, the pressure on the National Health Service (NHS) has
become increasingly acute. Huge cuts over the past decade – including
the loss of 17,000 hospital beds (https://www.theguardian.com/politics
/2019/nov/25/hospital-beds-at-record-low-in-england-as-nhs-struggles-with-
demand) – had left the NHS in a desperate position even before the
virus.
The internal market in the NHS is costing a staggering £4.5 ($5.48)
billion a year – enough to pay for 72,000 nurses, and 20,000 doctors.
Outsourcing of NHS services has led to worse healthcare outcomes
(https://leftfootforward.org/2020/03/caroline-lucas-coronavirus-and-why-we-
should-all-be-worried-about-the-us-trade-deal/). Some £9.2 ($11.2) billion
of the NHS budget was spent on private contracts in 2018
(https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/21/private-firms-nhs-budget-
matt-hancock-promise) – leaking cash from the healthcare system and
into the pockets of private companies.

Our health service is our collective immune system and it’s been in
desperate need of proper funding and support for some time.  So, it is
right that the UK government has brought private hospitals into the
fight against coronavirus.

But the Spanish government acted much faster and used a better
model; the private health sector was requisitioned, bringing it directly
into the realm of the public health system indefinitely. The UK
government has opted for a contract model, whereby the public pays
the cost value of services – for an undisclosed sum in a deal that hasn’t
been made public. 

Transparency on this deal is crucial – every dot and comma of it. And,
with private health companies hungry for long-term NHS contracts,
the government must commit to ending these contracts once the
current crisis has abated, as a coalition of campaign groups including
We Own It, War on Want and Momentum have demanded in their
recent open letter (https://weownit.org.uk/blog/open-letter-matt-hancock-
private-healthcare-announcement)to Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

But it isn’t just a matter of

‘ $11.2 billion of the NHS increasing the number of

beds. Current estimates
 budget was spent on private suggest we need 20,000 more

contracts in 2018 – leaking ventilators

(https://www.bbc.co.uk
cash out of the healthcare system
/news/technology-51909812) to
and into the pockets of private
treat people who contract
companies COVID-19 and are too sick to
breathe without medical
assistance – something which over 40 per cent
(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/ventilators-do-work-does-
feel-like-one/)of those hospitalized in China from COVID-19 required. 

The UK government has placed an order for 10,000 ventilators with

vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson, and an additional order for 3.5
million tests from the private sector – again for an undisclosed sum.  

And, last week, The Guardian revealed that in 2017, the Department of
Health had dismissed high-level medical advice about providing NHS
workers with protective equipment (https://www.theguardian.com/world
/2020/mar/27/advice-on-protective-gear-for-nhs-staff-was-rejected-owing-to-
cost) during an influenza pandemic, on the grounds that stockpiling it
would be too expensive.

Yet, now the government are relying on celebrity donors to fund

protective equipment and compete with the ‘commercial market who
are trying to sell the same PPE for extraordinary prices’, as one
medic, Dr Salaj Masand, put it to The Guardian. 

Rather than paying out public money to private companies, the

government could create a state-run, publicly-owned company to
manufacture vital equipment. This would enable the state to meet
NHS equipment needs quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively –
whether ventilators and personal protective equipment to tackle the
immediate crisis, or any other items for future healthcare needs.
Decisions about how best to fund and source healthcare equipment
will be of paramount importance in the upcoming weeks, as three
NHS frontline workers have already died from contracting the virus.

In times like these, everyone needs to pull together. People are willing
and able to look after each other – whether it’s checking up on
neighbours or donating to food banks.

But we can’t do this alone. This crisis has shown just how important
public services are – not least healthcare. When this emergency is
over we need to ensure that services are built to be resilient to future
crises. That means they need to be in public hands, running for public
good, not private profit.

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