by Ellie Mae

When Tony Benn was asked how the public would respond to the NHS being privatised, he replied “there would be a revolution.”

He was right. But the government, despite some of its more absurd recent decisions, is not so stupid. Lansley, Cameron et al know that you don’t privatise the NHS: you liberate here, you outsource there, until the groundwork is laid to such an extent that one of the biggest milestones of privatisation can be reached, and it is barely reported at all.

This week, Hinchingbrooke NHS Hospital in Cambridgeshire was almost completely taken over by Circle Health, the biggest private healthcare operator in the EU, in what the CBI unnervingly called a “trailblazing deal”, and what the BMA more bluntly said was “an untested and potentially worrying experiment.”

The decision represents the most significant step ever towards privatisating the NHS, and was described by the Financial Times’ Public Policy Editor as “an historic moment.”

Circle Health, in case you’re wondering, is a partnership (like John Lewis) which is managed, delightfully, by a former Goldman Sachs investment banker named Ali Parsa. The deal with Hinchingbrooke has been given a dose of PR, with press releases emphasising that Circle is ‘employee-owned.’

But Circle is far from a socialist utopia: half of the company is owned by private investors, including Blackrock – an asset management firm owned by the most well-paid CEO on Wall Street and famous for its lucrative hoovering up of the casualties of the 2008 financial crisis.

Make no mistake: Circle Health is a corporation at its mercenary best, with designs on expanding the UK’s private healthcare industry, and wooing the UK’s healthcare professionals away from the NHS. Andrew Lansley’s decision to give GPs control of 80% of their funding resonates harmoniously with Circle Health’s business practices, in which doctors are awarded shares in return for sending patients to Circle hospitals.

Such an alluring carrot would surely result in doctors prioritising private healthcare, not least because once they are given shares in Circle they would have a vested interest in the company’s profit margins.

It is slowly becoming clear is what a goldmine the NHS is, as more and more corporations emerge from the woodwork to siphon a bit off for themselves.

Reactions to Lansley’s NHS reforms were mixed at best, but it was private healthcare giant, Humana, whose charmless statement shed the most light on who the real beneficiaries will be. A spokesman for the company, which was once described by a whistleblower as “inherently unethical,” said: “are we optimistic? You bet we are.”

The rest of us, I suspect, should be feeling apprehensive.