In
2005 I had been a retired philosophy teacher in the Netherlands for several
years. Pensioned civil servants were entitled to a rebate on their medical
costs. It wasn’t much, but I liked this State-run system, called ZVO. In that
year the international consultancy firm KPMG began managing ZVO. It worked well
until 1 Jan 2006, when the Dutch healthcare system was almost completely
privatized (the first in the EU). ZVO was abolished in order to enact a new
health insurance law [1]. KPMG engineered this by paying out less and less each
year after that, ‘to ease the pain,’ as we were told. I did not know that ZVO
was outsourced to KPMG in 2005.
Privatization
gave the insurers near-total control over medical financing. Provisions were
dangerously downgraded, to increase profits. In December 2008 a specialist
informed me that I had a life-threatening illness. I was 66 and found an age
limit of 65 for adequate treatment. I moved to Uppsala Sweden, where specialists
saved my life [2]. How could the supposedly humanitarian EU allow such practices
(many residents were disadvantaged)? I decided to investigate and stumbled upon
Atos, an information technology (IT) company that began by fusing the French IT
firm Origin and part of Philips (Dutch) in 1996. It acquired the British and
Dutch divisions of KPMG Consultancy in 2002 [3], was named Atos Origin and
became Atos after further expansion in 2011[4].
The
firm’s Atos Healthcare section (UK) began work for DWP in 1998. It is contracted
to them through to 2015 [5]. Its morally and medically questionable disability
benefit assessment programme has received a good deal of publicity. The
revelations, including claims of at least 10,600 resultant deaths, are forcing a
reorganisation of this work [6].
In
2009 Mark Britnell, a former high NHS civil servant, became ‘Head of Healthcare,
Europe and UK’ for KPMG; he is now an advisor to the British government. At an
international health conference organised by industry in 2010, he remarked that
‘[T]he NHS will be shown no mercy’ in the coming privatizations, and that it
would be ‘a state insurance provider, not a state deliverer’ [7]. In effect, it
will take your money and distribute it to many businesses, from groups of GPs
upwards. The need for profits in this model will necessarily reduce the quality
and quantity of care, since when profits are subtracted from the total insurance
input, less cash is available for reinvestment. This is happening in Sweden and
the Netherlands now, with variations due to differences in their political
systems.
Britnell
might well be influencing the privatization of the NHS. Since KPMG’s Dutch
branch was part of Atos Origin in 2006, its financial destruction of ZVO helped
privatize healthcare in the Netherlands. Atos is not just an IT company: it is a
danger to EU public health [8].
2.
I describe this affair in Red Pepper, June/July 2009.
6.
http://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/new-call-to-put-dwpatos-on-trial-for-manslaughter/.
Caution is advised here. Although the government released the figure of 10,600
deaths in nine months of 2011, we do not know how many of these are directly
attributable to the assessment regime, e.g. from stress, cardiovascular issues,
and undiagnosed or untreated illnesses. (Atos does not investigate these. It
looks only at basic behavioural and mental capacities, not medical causes of
incapacity.)
7.
http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/lobbying/item/5343-%E2%80%9Cthe-nhs-will-be-shown-no-mercy-says-cameron-health-adviser,
http://www.powerbase.info/images/f/fe/Apax_Healthcare_conference_2010.pdf.
8.
I am indebted to Andy Cropper for ideas, information and support during the past
year or so. He has done us a service by compiling this thread of data about the
NHS:
George
Berger, Uppsala Sweden, 10 September 2013
With
many thanks to George for his permission to repost on DPAC
