Selling the NHS - What do you think we'd get for it?

A consistent claim at present is that - it being election season we’ll not identify who - some would sell the NHS off to American corporations. Which raises an interesting question really, how much would we get for it if we did?

As both parties tried to seize the initiative over the NHS, Corbyn at one point brandished a document he claimed showed that US negotiators hoped to secure full access to Britain’s health sector as part of a bilateral trade deal after Brexit.

“Full market access for US products to our National Health Service. You’re going to sell our National Health Service to the United States and big pharma,” he accused Johnson.

Full market access would mean American corporations would be treated just like any other supplier to the NHS. It does, after all, buy bandages, aspirin, food for the patients and the canteens and so on. Quite why allowing more people to bid for such contracts is a terror is unknown to us.

But think of trying to actually sell it. Flogging off the hospitals, the clinics. What would we get for it?

Sure, there are assets there but they’re not all that valuable without an income stream to cover their costs. That income stream currently being tax revenues. That is, the NHS, without its tax funding, is worth nothing more or less. Things that are worth nothing we find it very difficult to sell.

So, we could try and sell the NHS, sure. But to do so we’d have to insist that we were going to continue to fund it from general tax revenues. At which point, well, what would then have changed? We’d have a tax funded health service just as we do now. The intervention of those American corporations would just be a different set of managers handling the income stream and the assets. Which doesn’t strike us as being all that much of a terror.

Note what selling the NHS, lock stock and barrel, would not do - create that same set of employment based health insurance.

At which point we’ve two possible outcomes. We don’t continue tax funding and we can’t sell it, we do continue tax funding and it’s pretty much as it is. Thus we struggle to understand even what the claim, the allegation, is.

Oh, sure, we understand the emotional tug of the claim upon those British heartstrings. But surely we don’t think that appeals to irrationality are the way to manage 10% of the British economy.

Do we?