The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the vital importance of a comprehensive, publicly funded and universal health service. The choices we make during this crisis will shape the future of the NHS and our wider society.
We are already limited by poor decisions made before the virus struck. The Conservative’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, where people with a precarious immigration status risk deportation or destitution if they seek NHS services, means there may now be considerable apprehension to access necessary care. Though coronavirus treatment is exempt from charging for those without documentation, this message is likely to be lost.
When more beds were needed, rather than requisition private hospitals the government struck a deal where beds are rented for £300 each, per day. This amounts to a public sector bail out of private hospitals that the NHS should never have to pay. These beds could be utilised in the public interest; instead they are rented at public expense.
The government then wrote off £13.4bn of NHS debt. It is disingenuous to call this debt. It represents money that has been rightly spent on patient care, and the government’s actions acknowledge this with a trick of accounting. It is also only a fraction of the shortfall in NHS funding over the last ten years of austerity.
A sincere approach to the NHS’ debt would be to cancel Private Finance Initiative payments. £2bn was paid in 2016/17 in PFI debts, and repayments will continue every year until 2050. This lost wealth represents around 2% of the annual NHS budget. It could be reinvested to improve the nation’s health but instead vanishes into private hands. The same is true for private buildings used for NHS services. There is an opportunity to return these to the ownership of the public they serve.
Fragmentation, cuts and creeping privatisation have all contributed to the difficulties in our response the pandemic. More than 17,000 beds have been cut from the 144,455 that existed in 2010. The UK has a lower number of critical care beds per person than Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the USA, Japan, or South Korea. Years of underfunding led us to this moment. The PPE distribution fiasco shows the inability of the private sector to provide the service needed. Cutting warehouse capacity in order to prioritise profit means private distribution companies cannot now supply health and social care workers with the person protective equipment they need.
The hundreds of billions of pounds made instantaneously available in response to coronavirus shows the transformative power of the state to provide a crucial safety net for all of us. We can afford a far fairer society than the one we became accustomed to. Rapid changes to manufacturing capacity to produce ventilators, dialysis machines, PPE and other socially useful products demonstrates that an economy based on public ownership, planning and democratic control could meet the needs of people across the world, unlike the chaotic response of the free market.When this crisis eventually subsides, the public must not be made to pay. We must not return to more austerity.
We also cannot emerge from this pandemic and continue to ignore the harm caused by environmental destruction. The delayed, incomplete initial response to coronavirus echoes our apprehension to face the challenge presented by climate change. We should confront the runaway economic expansion that created the conditions for previous, current, and perhaps future outbreaks. We have an opportunity to live within our planetary means.
We could recreate our health and social care systems based on need not profit. We could choose to reduce inequality permanently. The reset button on society has been pushed – what happens next is up to all of us.
Doctors in Unite 