Over 12 months after its first publication on 19 January last year, the government's NHS "reform" bill is entering one of its last stages through Parliament. By now, however, nearly 2,000 amendments have been tabled to the original paper, each of which has been causing heated debate.

It has also been causing yet another media circus, with predictions of health minister Lansley's demise, real and imagined and Tory bloggers have been advising Cameron to drop the bill or lose the next election! This in turn is causing much frightened twittering amongst ConDem MPs and Lords... But so far, Cameron and Lansley have announced they will bravely - or stupidly - go where no politician has dared to go before.

Indeed, the Bill's only achievement so far it to have generated unanimous opposition from all quarters, be it nurses, doctors or the general public. And rightly so, because, in addition to transforming the NHS into an even worse administrative nightmare, the "reform" is designed to allow capitalists to milk the NHS budget like never before.

The profit sharks are queueing up

Of course, private profiteers have benefited from the NHS for a long time - some, ever since its inception. Like Britain's pharmaceutical giants, which are today, among the country's most profitable companies. They would never have been able to build up their empires, nor fund their research, without the NHS acting as a gigantic captive customer and field for experimentation.

More recently, there was the backdoor privatisation implemented under Labour - continuing the policy of its Tory predecessors, creating yet more ways for private sharks to line their pockets at the expense of the NHS budget - from the funding of infrastructure and services via Private Finance Initiatives, to the licensing of private clinics to carry out a range of clinical procedures.

Today's ConDem "reform", however, builds on Labour's past measures, to pave the way for all-out privatisation. That would be the end of the already compromised "National" Health "Service"...

For instance, all existing NHS facilities would be run like autonomous commercial outfits. National Agreements would be ended, allowing hospitals to save on workers' wages and cut conditions. In order to raise additional income, they would have to devote part of their NHS-funded resources to catering for fee-paying patients.

At the same time, the existing limits on the activities of private health facilities would be removed, opening the way for private health facilities to "compete" with cash-starved public hospitals for NHS funding, or even to take over the running of public hospitals altogether.

No wonder the private health giants are queuing up to lobby MPs, in the hope of getting a large chunk of the NHS budget through this "reform"!

For a really public health service

Strangely enough, the government's justification for opening up the NHS budget to the parasitism of the private sharks is "the unprecedented challenges from our ageing population and new, more expensive treatments", in the words of Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley.

Of course, medical science allows people to live longer and offers better treatments for more conditions. So it should. This is what progress is about. But it does not mean that medicine has to be more expensive for society. Quite the contrary, because, healthier people can use their skills more efficiently and for longer. In fact, effective medicine more than pays for itself, from the point of view of the interests of society as a whole.

But then, of course, politicians of the capitalist class like Lansley do not reason in terms of the interests of society, but only in terms of the interests of capitalist profits. And what they want, in the NHS, as in any other area under government control, is to increase the share of public funds that falls into the pockets of the profiteers.

Given the cost of new treatments, says Lansley, "savings have to be made" in the NHS. But how can "savings" possibly be made, by allowing private companies to pay shareholders' dividends out of the NHS budget? Instead, since the pharmaceutical giants are charging astronomical prices to the NHS, it would be far more effective to get rid of their parasitism - by capping their profits or, if they resist, by nationalising the lot of them!

Health is too vital to be entrusted to capitalists whose eyes are rivetted on their profit figures. Not only should the ConDem "reform" be stopped, but the NHS should be freed from private profiteering. Only then will it be possible for a really public, socially affordable health service to emerge, under the control of its workers and its patients.