NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care

Allyson M Pollock NHS Plc – The privatisation of our health care Verso 2004 HB, 256 pp, £15.00, 1 84467 011 2 This is likely to be a controversial and much discussed book. It will be very unpopular in the corridors of power, which alone should ensure a wide readership. Having last worked in the NHS in 1986 and suffered under the New Zealand health reforms of the 1990s, I shouldn't perhaps have been surprised by this book. I was, however, not just surprised but appalled at the facts and figures, which Professor Pollock has assembled to support her account of the disastrous privatisation of the NHS in recent decades. She describes in detail the ideological obsession of successive governments with the belief that the market will solve the problems created by decades of underfunding a system that once was the envy of the world. Her recurring thesis is that the involvement of private business in the private funding initiatives (PFIs) …