Private healthcare creeping in the back door

Sir, – Yesterday’s public update by our first minister, chief medical officer and Cabinet secretary for health, on Covid-19, was highly enlightening in a few areas, in particular the testing strategy.

My understanding previously was that the testing strategy adopted by Germany and South Korea would have been the correct strategy, provided we had the capacity to perform these tests and implemented them at the early stages in the January timeframe.

As a country we did not have this capacity and hence missed the window of opportunity

The clinical director further explained the actions required by us from 7.30pm till nearly 8.00pm, just prior to our ‘Clap for Vital People’.

In the UK, the NHS have over the last several years been subject to two ideological controls, the first harks back to the 2008 financial crash, and was accelerated from 2010 and the UK Government’s austerity project, by Messrs Cameron and Osborne.

The second is the embedded Conservative belief that government should be small and, to that end, health care ‘could’ be moved to the private rector rather than the government.

The ideology is based on the theory that if you have to pay you will only pay for what you can and observe good practices to avoid having to pay for healthcare.

This doesn’t seem to have worked in its main proponent, the USA.

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s announcement that the UK Gov. is going to increase testing (in England) by engaging with commercial companies like Amazon and Boots in the future to be capable of supplying test kits is more than concerning.

It appeared that he was setting up Amazon and Boots as the suppliers of choice to the UK population.

For Covid-19 as a short term expedient, this may be acceptable, but is it the thin end of the wedge?

Will we as a nation be told five to 10 years in the future that before we attend a doctor’s surgery we should previously have taken the test for HxxNyy offered by Boots or Amazon.

This is private healthcare creeping in by the back door.