IKE Margaret Thatcher before him, privatisation of the NHS is not politically viable as an option: but while the funding of the health service will remain public, through taxation, the provision of health care is increasingly being privatised.
Much of Gordon Brown's long awaited -extra NHS billions seems set to wind up in S the pockets of shareholders - and top bosses in the new "foundation hospitals".
On May 13 Blair staged a breakfast meet- www ing in Downing Street with private sector healthcare chiefs. He assured his eager guests that the private sector bids to run eleven new Diagnostic and Treatment Centres (DTCs), offering fast-track surgery for a variety of waiting list operations, were just the start of a much bigger move to break down the remaining barriers between the NHS and private medicine.
According to the Guardian, Blair told the assembled bosses:
"We are anxious to ensure that this is only the start of opening up the whole of the NHS supply system so that we end up with a situation where the state is the enabler, it is the regulator, but it is not always the provider."
While the NHS itself has to remain in place to deliver those services which the private sector dismisses as unprofitable -such as emergency services - there is a long line of profit-seeking private hospitals looking to cash in on lucrative contracts to deliver a variety of waiting list treatments, and long-term care of the elderly has already been effectively privatised.
Those hapless Labour MPs who were persuaded to give ministers the benefit of the doubt on foundation hospitals are now being told in no uncertain terms that there is much more privatisation to come, whether they like it or not.
Blair is also throwing down a challenge to health unions that have opposed foundation hospitals: unless they mount a fight, more and more services will be delivered by the private sector while NHS staff are left to fill in the gaps.
The new offensive is based on a number of key policies, each of which destabilises and fragments the existing NHS. Foundation Hospitals.
29 seem likely to be rubber-stamped by Milburn to start operating as "not for profit" companies from next April.
However we should not be fooled by the talk of "local democracy". Behind the win• turn the NHS into a cash cow HO AL