"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"
Aneurin Bevan

Saturday 21 August 2010

Private Centres in NHS Hospitals

This is from International Medical Travel Journal:
Manchester's Christie Hospital plans to treble its private income from £10 million to £30 million within 10 years thanks to a deal with US-based private hospital group HCA which will see the company pay £14 million for a new private cancer centre. 
That would be the Hospital Corporation of America, "the largest private operator of health care facilities in the world". In the 1990s it merged with Columbia Hospital Corporation. This is what Wikipedia has to say about them:

In December of 2000 Columbia/HCA pled guilty to Medicare and Medicaid fraud and agreed to pay criminal fines, civil penalties and damages of over $840 million.[5] In 2003 HCA agreed to pay an additional $871 million in civil penalties and damages for cases of fraud and kickbacks. The total of over $1.7 billion for these cases made it the largest fraud settlement in US history at the time. Then-CEO Rick Scott was ousted by the board of directors but he was not criminally prosecuted. In 2009, Rick Scott also spearheaded Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, the largest-membership lobbying group against healthcare reform.
These are the sort of people we are handing our NHS over to. Fightening, isn't it?

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