[Lucysgirl]

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

The real news: Jeremy Hunt is up to no good with the NHS | Deborah Orr | Politics | The Guardian read this, this is what jeremy hunt is doing.goodbye to the nhs.people get your head out of the sand

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Do we really still have a National Health Service as set up in the 1940s?

If you remember in 2002 tenders were being invited from foreign clinical teams for work in our NHS hospitals!!!

Once upon a time money from the treasury would build the hospitals and buy the equipment plus pay for the staff. If we're honest about it we'll see that Blair/Brown got into bed with private financiers when they thought up the "Private Finance Initiative", which they promised would be a good deal for the country..

If the Treasury had organised the cash for the new hospitals we'd be paying about 3% interest. We should all cry when we see how much Blair/Brown have "saved us" :-

<<The private finance initiative substantially increases the cost of hospital building. Total costs (construction costs plus financing costs) in a sample of hospitals built under the private finance initiative are 18-60% higher than construction costs alone.



Shareholders in private finance initiative schemes can expect real returns of 15-25% a year.1



The consortiums involved in these schemes charge the NHS fees equivalent to 11.2-18.5% of construction costs.


Medical staff are deeply implicated in hospital private finance initiative schemes. Clinical directors approve and medical directors sign off the full business case, clinical posts are lost, and heroic targets are set for gains in medical productivity. Clinical concerns are generally met by assurances that the largely undisclosed price of the private finance initiative is well worth paying because schemes approved by the initiative offer better value for money than public procurement. This claim is based on the fact that, for approval purposes, all privately financed schemes are compared with a notional publicly funded equivalent, the public sector comparator. However, this comparison is carried out using an appraisal methodology under which the cash payments associated with each option are “discounted,” and costs are adjusted to reflect “risk transfer.” Both these factors have an influence on the results of the comparison.>>
source: PFI in the NHS?is there an economic case? | BMJ