Over 12 months after its first publication on 19 January last year, the government's NHS "reform" bill is entering what is likely to be one of its last stages through Parliament. By now, however, nearly 2,000 amendments have been tabled to the original proposal, each of which is likely to cause heated debates. Some commentators are even beginning to predict that, eventually, Cameron will have no choice but to drop his plans altogether - although this remains to be seen.
The fact is, that so far, this NHS bill's only achievement will have been to generate unanimous opposition from just about all quarters concerned - from health workers and professionals to patients. And rightly so, because, in addition to transforming the NHS into an even worse administrative nightmare than it already is, the "reform" is really designed to allow capitalists to parasitise the NHS budget on an unprecedented scale.
The profit sharks are queueing up
Not that private profiteers haven't been benefiting from the NHS for a long time already - in fact ever since its inception.
Britain's pharmaceutical giants, in particular, are among the country's most profitable companies. But they would never have been able to build up their present business empires, nor to fund their research to discover new medicines, without using the NHS both as a gigantic captive customer and as a field for experimentation.
More recently, there was the backdoor privatisation implemented under Labour - following on from its Tory predecessors. They created a whole number of new 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.
As to the ConDems' "reform", it builds on Labour's past measures, to pave the way for all-out privatisation.
So, for instance, existing NHS facilities would be run like autonomous commercial outfits. National Agreements would be ended, allowing hospitals to save on workers' wages. In order to raise additional income, they would, for instance, 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. And 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, being in better health, 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 whole lot of them!
Health is too vital to be entrusted to capitalists whose eyes are rivetted on their profit figures. Not only should the ConDems' "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 patients.