Martin warns against privatisation of NHS services

8.00.00pm GMT Thu 12th Nov 2009

Addressing Gloucestershire's British Medical Association tonight, Cheltenham MP Martin Horwood will launch a scathing attack on the creeping privatisation of healthcare under successive Tory and Labour governments. He will quote the collapse of NHS dentistry and the hiving off of hospital services to new independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) as examples and warn that growing pressure on public finances may risk further undermining of the NHS.

He will say: 'I'm happy to pledge my support tonight for the BMA's Look After Our NHS campaign which has pointed out, very persuasively to me, that there is no evidence of real healthcare benefit from the pseudo market in healthcare created by the Conservatives in the 1990s, continued by new Labour in the noughties and which has always been a stalking horse for at least partial privatisation. Certainly privatisation that cherry picks the most profitable services from NHS Trusts and undermines their finances while boosting private profits seems to me to be defeating the interest of a publicly funded health service. Not least because in leaving the more complex cases for the NHS, it will create a quite artificial impression of better outcomes in the private sector.'

Martin added: 'Labour supporters must feel particularly let down that a party that asked us to save the NHS from the Tories has continued with the creeping privatisation of health services. The truth is that if you let the market run healthcare, you end up with the kind of vicious inequalities they have today in the USA. Barack Obama is rightly trying to take the US in our direction. I just hope we don't pass him going the other way.'