- The British National Health Service is the nation's proudest achievements, lifting burden from the sick, copied across the world, But it has been under sustained attack over decades by successive governments. Realising that privatisation would be unpopular. The Thatcher Government instead started a program of out sourcing that was continued and expanded under the Blair New Labour Government and up to the present. It required careful planning and a series of legal and structural changes spanning thirty years to bring it to the brink of American corporate capture; or as one former policy adviser put it, reduced to 'a funding stream and a logo' A docile and complicit media have failed to hold power to account and inform the public about what is really happening to their NHS. Austerity and chaos over Brexit has provided perfect cover for the engineered failure of services, necessary to persuade the public to fall out of love with the NHS. NHS land, patient data and tax-funded budgets are all up for grabs. How did we get here? This film reveals "The Great NHS Heist." "Even if you only care about efficiency the National Health Service should be preserved like a jewel" - Yanis Varoufakis Interviews with :—Bob Gill
- THE GREAT NHS HEIST is an independent production designed to expose the covert destruction of the English National Health Service. Post-war Atlee's government implemented Aneurin Bevan's ambition of an NHS in July 1948. It meant everyone in Britain could get free medical care and this successful revolutionary social advance was copied across the world. From the beginning there was strong political opposition and from the British Medical Association. Throughout Margaret Thatcher's premiership forces determined to replace the NHS with an American style, profit making, private insurance-based system gathered momentum. In Britain's Biggest Enterprise (1988) Oliver Letwin MP outlined the plan which required stealth, complexity, deception and co-operation of consecutive governments to avoid a public backlash. We witnessed the new corporate managerialism and marketisation of healthcare, shrinkage of the NHS bed capacity, and transfer of assets into the private sector using Private Finance Initiative and NHS land sales. Private operators expanding their grip on the NHS, securing contracts for the provision of ancillary and then clinical services, rapidly accelerated by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. The privatisation lobby crafted effective cover stories and carefully managed the national debate to maintain public ignorance and remained largely unchallenged by a compliant mainstream media. Successive reforms were presented as essential improvements while disguising the reality of creeping privatisation. The stage was set for the heist of NHS land, patient medical data, and the £120 billion annual tax-funded budget for US corporate raiders. The American medical-industrial complex is expensive, dysfunctional and endemically fraudulent yet it is the model being replicated in England. Over thirty million Americans have no medical insurance or government funded care, millions more also financially ruin from medical bills despite having insurance. Hospital providers over investigate and over treat to increase profits by defrauding and potentially harming the sick - while insurers try to avoid seriously ill and expensive people and deny payments when policyholders become too costly. In America life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality measures are much worse than in other countries where expenditure on healthcare is vastly lower. Nevertheless health policy in England has accelerated in the wrong direction under the cover of austerity. Chief Executive of NHS England, Mr Simon Stevens, former head of global expansion for US health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, has progressed the insurance industry designed changes in the NHS, introducing their personnel, IT systems and business methods. The final legal changes to create American Health Maintenance Organisation models, called Integrated Care Systems, are underway. Aligning financial incentives for providers with those of insurers to increase profits by the denial of care to the sick. Patients, health professionals, campaigners and experts from England and America deliver a comprehensive exposé of the three-decade long heist of our nation's proudest achievement, as summed up in this warning from former US insurance industry executive turned whistleblower, Wendell Potter: "In this country we scare people by saying we don't want to go down the slippery slope to socialised medicine. Well I tell you something, (what) scares me even worse is going down the slippery slope to the American healthcare system."
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