I wouldn't want you thinking that I was anti-capitalist (although it is probably quite likely that you could draw me down that route) but for a while I have been wanting to write a little blog about the thoughts of Noam Chomsky, an American linguist and philosopher whose Wikipedia page is here.
For a start, he is not a Holocaust denier for anybody that might say, but he is a guy who cleverly looks at things from a detached angle and his thoughts resonate really clearly with what's happening to us, not just in healthcare but in the UK. The point of the blog post resonates around this quote "The standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital". Sound familiar?
Recently one of the nursing services at Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham went out to tender and the tender was won by a private company. This is happening throughout the NHS. Of course it has been happening in dentistry forever but not on the scale that we see now where lots of dentistry is owned by American private capital. Just look at the political strategy that is being used here and you see it all through the public sector. A recession is the opportunity to privatise and corporatise everything.
Defund, demoralise then privatise.
In the end the wealth is owned by a very few amount of people and so the cycle continues. This cannot be a good thing because in the end the head of the monster will eat its own tail. It's perhaps a great reason to maintain your independence in dentistry (if you still have it) and to fight as hard as you can for this independence as the opposite of the privatisation guys. If you need an incentive to stay away from the corporates then this is probably incentive enough.
Blog Post Number: 827
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