Already we have seen the shambolic hand-over to four profit-seeking companies of the supply of bottled oxygen to vulnerable patients at home - with predictably disastrous COnsCuuCuces.
But much bigger prizes are up for grabs as Blair predicted that the private sector would soon be providing up to 40 percent of NHS operations: the consequences of this could be devastating for the NHS.
Blair's promise would mean at least 1.2 million or as many as 2 million NHS operations a year being privatised, offering a huge expansion programme TOR privale providers .. at the expense of widespread crisis and closures in the NHS.
The impact would be even larger than it appears because the private sector does not offer emergency treatment, and will not take on any potentially complex or costly cases.
So the 40 per cent figure would mean private providers creaming off a majority of routine surgical cases: this would strike a body blow at the training of junior doctors, and at medical research which is only carried out in major NHS University hospitals.
Another big step along this route will be taken in the summer when Patricia Hewitt announces the winners of the contracts to deliver a second round of "Independent Sector Treatment Centres" England, which will share out Crawley Hospital lost its A&E, but now faces fresh cutbacks as services throughout Surrey and Sussex face drastic reductions to balance huge deficits. The Department of Health is devising a "failure regime" for Trusts and PCTs which cannot break even the additional £3 billion she announced would be spent on private treatment shortly after her appointment as Health Secretary.
We know for a fact that the monev will go to private providers because NHS hospitals even Foundation Trusts - are excluded from the bidding process.
The only "competition" involved the rivalry between Blair's 1l greedy private sector "partners" seeking to carve up the available contract income between them.
The Department of Health document proposing the second wave of ISTCs makes no more pretence that the private sector is being brought in to create additional capacity:
recognised that nOW I Is under DoH direction waiting list operations will be transferred from NHS hospitals (leaving under-used departments with inflated costs and a caseload of complex, chronic and costly patients the private sector does not want).
Indeed, because the services are being transferred, the DoH argues that it should also allow the transfer of NHS staff to carry out the work -permitting them to be seconded from NHS hospitals: publicly-funded Treatment Centres and facilities are also likely to be handed over to private operaLUIS.
As if all this was not a big enough bonanza for a parasitic and
cynical privale SCCLOr, which Call hardly For further information see: www.keepournhspublic.com www.healthemergency.org.uk Primary Care Trust to put any public sector NHS service out to competitive tender from "any willing provider".
Of course all this is a oneway process: there has never been any corresponding right for patients or local people aggrieved at the abysmal quality of privatised services to force them to be brought back in-house
Every aspect of this new policy agenda centres on New Labour's bizarre and baseless ideological Convicon that the private sector is always somehow superior in quality than public services.
Those of us who disagree face an urgent fight to try to change their minds while we still have a recognisable NHS.