Director, Health Emergency July began with health ministers once more on the back toot. They were caught out for a second time trying secretly to hand control of the £64 billion NHS commissioning budget to private insurance companies, being forced to recant, and then frantically denying the patiently obvious - that Blair's market-style "reforms" to the NHS are driving a rapid and widespread process of privatisation.
Cornered Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has been trying to minimise the latest damage to her department's credibility, while Department of Health civil servants lied through their teeth on the scale of the wave of redundancies ripping through NHS, and attempted to discredit campaigners publishing the genuine figures.
The note of panic in the Department was reinforced by the abject chaos as Patricia Hewitt was forced publicly to intervene and order the witharawal ol an advert placed in the Official Journal of the EU inviting insurance companies with commissioning budgets in excess of £300m a year (i.e. major private sector insurers including some of the most notorious multi-billion dollar corporations in the US which made their fortunes by excluding the poor and sick from health cover) to bid for contracts tramework tracts' to deliver a wide range of commissioning and management services to Primary vare Irusts, wich acl as "commissioners of services. controlling 80 percent of the £80 billion NHS budget.
The terms of this invitation made it quite clear that virtually all aspects of the PCTs' role - including control over the lion's share of their budget for purchasing care for their local resiaent population -were to be offered out to private bidders:
"This will include, but not be limited to, responsibility for population improvement, the purchasing of hospital and community care, supporting local GPs develop practice-based commissioning [sic], the management and development of community health services for the PCT resident population, and other services."
Such all would sound the death-knell for PCTs, which were only established in 2002 and are still in the throes of the latest reorganisation: it would leave them with next to nothing to ao, orner than warm up tne vol-au-vents. shine the shoes of the private sector commissioners and arrange the paper clips for occasional board meetings.
Yet, staggeringly, this massive exercise in privatisation had been hatched up behind closed doors by a small cabal of ministers and free market fundamentalist advisors, with not the slightest attempt at consultation with MPs, health unions, NHS managers or the medical profession.
News of the plan leaked first in the Financial Times on June 19, but it was not until a full week later, as copies of the advert landed in the emails of health correspondents, that the story was more widely recognised - and ministers forced to account for themselves.
In the aftermath of the disastrous bv-election results and New Labour's Caldstrophic showing in opinion polls, it was obvious that not even the most servile and dim-witted Labour MP with any aspiration to re-election would fancy their chances of flogging this policy to a hostile electorate, and the law of political gravity was reasserted: the policy was dumped, at least for the time being.
This makes it a second time that ministers have been caught out trying to hand over hundreds of millions in NHS budgets to the stewardship of money-grubbing US health insurance companies that