An NHS in crisis and boom time for private health: that’s the bleak prognosis now
A man keeps sliding through my door. Dressed in blue hospital scrubs, he wears a hostly smile and a beard sprinkled with grey to denote experience. The leaflet he is on asks a question: “Tired of waiting?” It also has an answer: “Private treatment made easy”.
I’ve never had a surgeon flop on to my doormat before. Discounts for a Domino’s, yes. Ebulliently misspelt flyers about guttering, naturally. But this is the first time private hospitals have asked over and over if sir fancies a scalpel somewhere intimate. And opening the leaflet from Circle, I find promises galore. “Eliminate the wait,” urges the UK’s largest private hospital group, while “treatment is more affordable than you think” is above a price list: knee replacements start at £13,250, a hysterectomy goes for nearly £9,000, and snipping out your child’s tonsils costs “from £3,276”.
If those sums sound stretching, the leaflet advises, I can spread the cost with a whole suite of loans. Get that titanium hip 12 months interest free! And shopping around is easy, too. Why, midway through the paragraph above, another leaflet arrived, from a rival chain of hospitals. If you want to see just how our NHS gets privatised, this is the moment to study your junk mail.
Perhaps you’re among the more than one in 10 English people waiting for routine hospital treatment. Maybe you’ve read about the massive cuts looming in cancer care and GP appointments and wondered at the misery to come. But there are a few for whom this purgatory of pain is great business. For those who own and run private hospitals, it spells millions in extra profits. Because when patients can no longer stand the years and the uncertainty of hoping they can get a hernia repair or a colonoscopy, they end up
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