‘A former adviser to Tony Blair who has spent a decade at the top of an American private healthcare giant has been appointed to run the NHS in England.
Simon Stevens, the architect of Labour’s health reforms who left the UK in 2004 to take up a lucrative post at the American company UnitedHealth, was welcomed by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, as a “reformer and an innovator”.
But his selection as chief executive of NHS England will raise concerns among critics who claim the NHS is being “softened up for privatisation”. It was announced last night that Mr Stevens would take a 10 per cent voluntary pay cut for one year on the advertised salary of £211,000, “in the light of NHS spending pressures”.’
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