Source: How is it created and who benefits the privatization of health?
Teacher angels
Medical and Superior Public Health Technique.Red Red Militator
Many people think that the privatization of health is a recent phenomenon product of PP policies.This is a serious mistake, a bad diagnosis, which prevents proper treatment of the causes, because as in a disease, if we treat only the symptoms we are not acting effectively and the process is aggravated.
The privatizations of public companies and services are a spinal part of the response of the great capital to the great economic crisis that we live now, which begins in the seventies.Neoliberal policies are part of a general strategy aimed at tryingof labor and social rights and privatizations.
They are long -range policies, implemented by governments of all political color, in a framework of class struggle marked by the co -optation of the union domes and the corresponding setback of the power of the working class.
The first assault of privatizations takes place over public companies.The private business is assured, not only because they are sold at the price of balance and practically under monopoly, but because to the extent that they produce necessities (light, fuels, transport, communications, water, etc.) the clientele isinsured.In the Spanish State this process is initiated by the PSOE in the mid -eighties coinciding with the entry into the EEC and is continued by the governments of the PP.
The second assault is public services, and especially health, which consumes a considerable percentage of GDP (7% in 2013).
Already with the UCD government, meetings took place in the Ministry of Health in which private insurers, pharmaceutical industry, representatives of banks and large companies participated, together with leaders of the large media. The objective was to plan, and finance, discredit campaigns of public health. The argument is well known: it is bureaucratic, wasteful, uninjury and its staff yields little because it has its insured work, in the face of the competitiveness and effectiveness of the private company.
In 1991 it was intended to take a qualitative leap.The Plenary of Congress approved the elaboration of a report for the consolidation and modernization of the National Health System.The PSOE, governing with an absolute majority, commissioned its elaboration to Fernando Abril Martorell, former attorney for the Cortes de Franco and vice president of the Spanish Central Bank.The report was a guide for the preparation of health for their privatization, including the introduction of co -payment for the use of health services and drugs for pensioners.The public presentation of the report was aborted because as a deputy, then, of IU, I had access to their conclusions and I could make them public, conveniently explained, before they were officially presented.Before the enormous rejection of the report, the report was never voted in Parliament but its basic proposals were executed.
Privatization - “outsourcing” - of hospital services such as cleanings, laundries, kitchens, ambulances, etc., and concerts with the private health of low complexity surgery (themore profitable), radiodiagnosis, etc. I highlight for its importance the privatization of cleaning services, almost all subcontracted by construction companies, and which resulted in a drastic template cut and precariousness in employment.These facts are directly responsible for the spectacular increase in hospital infections, with the corresponding increase in mortality and hospital spending [1].
In 1997, governing the PP in the minorPP, PSOE, PNV, CIU and CC.The day after his vote, CC OO issued a statement by congratulating the great parliamentary support received “by a key law for the modernization of the SNS” .
The private company had open the way and the different regional governments (of the PP, of the PSOE, or of the PSOE with IU and other leftist parties such as the Catalan tripartite or the Balearic Pentapartite) executed it.It was the safest business that they could dream, especially in times of crisis: public financing and clientele and private benefit.
The construction companies, after the outbreak of the real estate bubble, have entered strongly into the management of private management hospitals: a part them involved in the gürtel plot such as Begar, Ploder, Hispanic, other “donors” of the PPas OHL, or the Cantoblanco Group of Arturo Fernández.private insurers such as Sanitas or Adeslas.Capio, owned by CVC Capital Partners, risk capital group and dedicated to speculation, has all the visions of becoming in the great monopoly of private management of public health
The link between political decisions and business interests is evident.Former Health Counselors such as Manuel Lamela, with interests in Capio, or Güemes, who had to resign as a unilabs advisor, owned by Capio, a company to which he awarded the management of clinical analysis of six hospitals, illustrate it.> Another case is Antonio Burgueño, current general director of hospitals of the Community of Madrid, who was Medical Director of Adeslas, a company integrated in Ribera Health and main promoter of the first private management hospital, that of Alzira, and whose son, AntonioBurgueño Jerez, works as head of the Business and Quality Development Unit at Ribera Salud, a winner of the Torrejón Hospital.
But the signing of "arrangers" is not only limited to the ranks of the PP.Nicolás Redondo Terreros is a advisor to FCC, a company that manages the Hospital de Arganda, to which we must add the long list of former ministers and former PSOE Health Ministers who are counselors of large multinationals, including those of the pharmaceutical industry.
The theft of health by private companies, with the necessary collusion of governments, is not just an plundering of public resources, it is also a crime. the business in health, impossible if aUniversal and quality care, is achieved against the life and safety of patients, in addition to increasing cost.
The explanation of the mechanisms to achieve it exceed the limits of this article.I list some of them:
Decrease in the amount of personnel (around 30%) and the qualification of the same.
Patient selection, leaving non -profitable for public health.
Overindication of profitable surgical interventions.
Prioritization of patients depending on the income that your care reports to the company.
Pressure on health administrations, tothrough the collusion of politicians, to raise the amounts paid by public health.
The execution of savings mechanisms (high early, low use of expensive diagnostic and treatment resources), vital to get the business, require "collaboration" especially of medical staff, which is the one who indicates spending.To achieve this, temporary contracts, insecurity at work and that an important part of the salary are linked to the fulfillment of expense decrease objectives are decisive.
The reality is that all this gear has unquestionable legal coverage, endorsed by courts of the courts before which it has been denounced: Law 15/97 of new forms of management.that for their own lives it means the privatization of health and the consequent decision about the necessary action to prevent it from being saved.
It is necessary, in my opinion, that at this time we focus, not so much on mass demonstrations, as in the creation and extension of local groups, sufficiently coordinated, capable of going to the offensive and blocking the execution of the privatization plans, it isTo say, that the popular power manifests and acts with three major objectives: not one more privatization, repeal of Law 15/97 and return to public hands everything privatized.