Who Are The Fat Cats Of Health And Who Is Paying The Price?
A public event and photographic exhibition organised by Sussex Defend the NHS and Brighton & Hove Keep our NHS Public.
Who is profiting from the NHS privatisation?
The NHS stands at a crossroads. For more than 60 years Britain has enjoyed a National Health Service that strives to be comprehensive, accessible and high value for money. Now, government reforms threaten both the ethos of the NHS, and the planned and equitable way in which it delivers care to patients.
At the heart of the changes is the creation of a market that welcomes profit-driven international corporations who answer to shareholders, not patients. This market will compel hospitals and health professionals, who have traditionally cooperated to deliver healthcare, to compete with each other and with the private sector. Far from supporting the NHS, the private sector is in competition with it, and is already draining away resources and staff.
The public is often unaware how much of the NHS has already been privatised, because private providers often operate under an NHS logo. The vision of some politicians is that the NHS will be reduced to nothing more than a ‘kitemark’ applied to private providers.
This free talk explains and explores what’s happening to the NHS and features Linda Kaucher from the campaign against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed free trade agreement between the EU and the US which critics say would increase corporate power and make it more difficult for governments to regulate markets for public benefit.
Plus…
“How come we didn’t know” a photographic exhibition by Marion Macalpine
This powerful photographic exhibition brings together art photography with a key national issue: the reconstitution of our public terrain as a marketplace, and how consent to this process has been managed, exemplified in the sell-off of the NHS.
Large formal photographs show headquarters and clinical sites of multi-national corporations that are buying up the NHS through a rapid but stealthy process . Further images show how corporates masquerade as the NHS, their strategies for maximising profits, and how they influence government to change the international rules of the game so that the corporate take-over becomes irreversible.
The NHS is one of the few sites where the ‘naturalness’ of neo-liberalism and competitive individualism has a chance of popular challenge.
The exhibition runs from 24th – 26th June with a formal press opening of the exhibition on Tuesday 24th June at 12pm by Caroline Lucas MP