Bob Gill is a General Practitioner and NHS campaigner who directed the film The Great NHS Heist exposing how, over decades, our National Health Service has been packaged up and readied for privatisation by successive governments.
Real Media first interviewed Dr Gill five years ago, and much has happened since then to confirm his suspicions and validate his warnings.
Just two months ago, Boris Johnson’s government passed the new Health and Care Act which set up Integrated Care Systems, mirroring an American ‘managed-care’ model. Among its many shortcomings, it introduces greater power to Ministers to make future changes without parliamentary scrutiny, more barriers to face-to-face GP appointments, more private corporation influence over boards, and fewer legal requirements on standards of care.
In our new interview, Bob explains how the new Public Private Partnerships, with fixed budgets, will inevitably lead to staff exploitation and denial of care as well as the shrinking of unprofitable areas of the NHS like Accident & Emergency or mental health provision.
Dr Gill exposes how the media have failed to explain the real purpose of changes in NHS structures, and how they are scapegoating GPs, immigrants, the elderly and so on, rather than analysing the root cause of the crisis in the NHS, which is the government’s policy agenda.
The pandemic response was costly, very heavily privatised, and according to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee a massively expensive waste of money, but it was also a major opportunity to maximise private profiteering.
Insurance companies, private medicine providers and pharmaceutical corporations all stand to profit from further privatisation, and we know that for natural monopolies like healthcare, this can only mean trouble. Bob Gill asks us to consider the water companies – they’ve not built a new reservoir in decades, nor new sewage treatment works, instead maximising shareholder dividends and pumping raw sewage into our rivers and seas. Translate that business methodology into healthcare, and you will have patients being denied care, as well as preventable suffering and death on a large scale, just as we see in the USA.
With the media, unions, and even charities such as Mind, Alzheimer’s Society and Age Concern, for a variety of reasons all failing to shout from the rooftops, Dr Gill is begging the public to wake up, educate your family and friends, get on national talk radio, and join grassroots movements to fight this utter betrayal by our politicians before it is finally too late.
