The Trade Bill Proves the NHS is up for Sale

The Government’s decision to vote down an amendment that would have protected the NHS proves everything is up for sale.


U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Downing Street in London, Britain, July 21, 2020. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/Pool
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets with Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Downing Street in London, Britain, July 21, 2020. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/Pool
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WESTMINSTER (Labour Buzz) - Labour’s Emily Thornberry has claimed the Trade Deal proves the NHS is up for sale. In an article published by the Guardian, she argues that neither the US healthcare giants nor the US negotiators would be ‘doing their jobs properly’ if they weren’t doing everything they could to get the best deal possible. 

That means getting to sink their teeth into the juicy but until now off-limits, pie that is the NHS. 

“Would they regard that agreement as an opportunity to maximise their access to the UK health market, and their potential share of income when the NHS commissions medical services and procures equipment and drugs?” she writes. “Would they see it as a chance to mine the NHS’s vast source of patient data for their own clinical and diagnostic research, not least to develop tools and medicines that they could sell back to the NHS?”

The US health sector is booming. Thanks to an aging population spending, as elsewhere, is surging. The health sector became the USA’s largest employer. Around $3.65 trillion was spent on healthcare in the States in 2018 alone. 

The industry uses that buying power to develop a formidable lobbying presence in American politics, and Thornberry asks if that is being brought to bear in the coming negotiations. By rejecting Labour’s proposed amendments, the Conservatives have made it much easier for them to do so. 

As leaked documents showed before the election, Trump’s negotiating team had insisted that everything should be on the table unless specifically excluded. This vote means the NHS and everything else is very much on the table which could raise the prospect of US corporations using their legal power to force entry into the market. 

“Would they try to use the legal enforcement mechanisms of a deal to challenge any attempts to cap the prices they charge for their services and products, limit their ability to bid for NHS contracts, or dictate how they deliver services that they are contracted to provide?” she asks. “And what about the difficult and emotive decisions the NHS often needs to take, for financial reasons, to ration access to certain treatments or drugs: would US pharmaceutical companies want to challenge that constraint on their business?”

This, she says, should be resisted at all costs. In Britain, we work on the basis that the “fundamental priority when it comes to health is patient care, not the profits of private companies.” In the US, of course, profit is everything. 

That’s why, she says, Labour added a clause specifically excluding the NHS from such negotiations. The Government has repeatedly stated that the NHS is categorically not for sale and describes any suggestion to the contrary as a scare story. 

If that’s the case, Thornberry asks, why not sign up to the amendment? Instead, their decision to vote it down shows the Government’s reassurances for what they are: not worth the paper they aren’t written on.  

(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)

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