Leaving the public sector to cope with the difficult areas (both types of care, and actual areas - easier to run a primary practice in a region with a younger, healthier population), and tempting the better staff off with higher pay. There's been some trials already; Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon was run for a few years by Circle, and it was a failure:
Though the details are shocking, the general picture is unsurprising to anyone except those who bought the ideological hype about private sector magic dust. Circle won the contract by promising what the Public Accounts Committee called an ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unprecedented’ level of savings - urged on by government officials. Circle’s Full Business Case said it would achieve this by altering ‘nurse-patient ratios’ but exactly how was blacked out of the plan when it was eventually published. Leaks suggested plans to cut 320 posts in total.
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Just as opponents to the Health & Social Care Act pointed out, what the private sector really want to do is cherry pick, taking the government money to run all the predictable and easy stuff - starving the rest of the NHS of funds as a result.
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In nearby Bedfordshire, Circle recently won a huge ‘integrated’ ‘prime contractor’ contract for all musculo-skeletal services in the area - and promptly tried to sub-contract the undesirable bits back to the NHS on Circle’s own terms. As the local NHS hospital told the BBC, “Our concern is that if we don't have the planned work coming through, then with the way the NHS is financed, we don't know whether we will have sufficient money to provide the emergency service.” Recent reports suggest Bedford Hospital is now in severe financial difficulties.
A little further afield in Nottingham, Circle runs the largest Independent Sector Treatment Centre in Europe, having pulled off an eyebrow-raising deal to force the NHS to pay it £42 million to buy its clinic in the hospital grounds, then lease it back to it. Circle then continued to expand, recently successfully bidding to take over the hospital’s routine NHS dermatology services - to the disgust of the doctors who left rather than be transferred to Circle. Now, the local NHS hospital is closing its acute dermatology services too, because it can’t afford to provide only the more expensive dermatology services Circle doesn’t want. Patients will be forced to travel ever further afield for anything more complicated or less profitable.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/hinchingbrooke-why-did-englands-privatised-hospital-deal-really-collapse/The US wants a trade deal that would force any British government to allow corporations to take profit from any part of the NHS that they can - knowing that US health companies are experts at squeezing that profit out. It would also, no doubt, try to tie the NHS's hands on negotiating drug prices, for the profit of US pharma companies.
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