We reproduce this essential documentary from the Sell-Off website, with thanks.
As the authors of this important film note: “Your NHS has been quietly transformed into a business ready for corporate takeover and conversion to the American private insurance model. Sell-Off exposes the two-decade covert privatisation which has occurred without public mandate and against the public interest.”
This issue has long been covered by our party and our papers. It is not enough merely to wish for better times. If workers want to reverse privatisation and ensure that comprehensive, free healthcare is available in the future, they must organise real resistance.
No cooperation with NHS privatisation; healthcare is a right, not a commodity!
1. the immediate scrapping of all PFI debt;
2. the scrapping of the ‘internal market’, which pushes privatisation, not ‘efficiency’;
3. the scrapping of the STPs and their associated cuts;
4. the scrapping of foundation trusts, CCGs etc, which act as businesses first and health providers second;
5. the reintroduction of integrated health planning, commissioning and provision on a national and regional level by the NHS;
6. an end to the private provision of healthcare, which doesn’t ‘add choice’ or ‘increase overall health funding’ but only adds cost, and ultimately deprives the poor of healthcare;
7. an end to pay freezes and ‘restraint’ and to the tearing up of national employment contracts and frameworks;
8. the nationalisation of all drug and medical technology companies.
It has long been the case that while public debt is social, profitable enterprises are in ‘private’ hands.
The CPGB-ML believes that the welfare of workers can only be safeguarded by a socialist system of economy, controlled and administered by the working people themselves.
Let the capitalists’ ministers try and show us otherwise; let them start by meeting this list of simple demands. (Leaflet: Save our NHS)
For more information on Dr Bob Gill, one of the campaigners involved in making this film, see Cloak and dagger: the operation to kill the NHS. (April 2017)
See also: The junior doctors’ contract and the US corporate takeover of the NHS by Bob Gill, December 2015)
