One factor which underpins the current US vilification of the NHS, but which has drawn little attention, is the unbridled power of healthcare business lobby. It has the funding, the PR, the lobbying machine, the advertising reach and the political muscle to launch a torrent of mistruths and half-truths which can change the terms of a debate. It commands the flow of corporate donations which oils the path to political influence whichever party wins an election, whether in the US or here. It offers consultancies, directorships and advisory roles for a constant stream of former ministers and officials who mutate effortlessly into corporate lobbyists. It can even threaten to overturn the key policy reform of a popular President who has just won a convincing mandate for it from an overwhelming electoral victory. Rampant corporate power, the obverse of corporate accountability, is now a central political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the lies and intimidation now being so blatantly deployed to defend the huge insurance vested interests in the US are egregiously odious, the parallels with the UK healthcare, pensions, banking, construction, pharmaceuticals, energy and defence industries is uncomfortably close.

The massive scale of privatisation over the last 3 decades has greatly weakened the regulatory role of the State and opened up enormous new markets for the privatised industries, but at the same time has increasingly exposed those industries to the profound consequences of economic instability which they cannot cope with unaided and which the State cannot tolerate. In the US the exorbitant charging by the private healthcare providers and the big insurance companies is now threatening to cripple, not only the 25 million Americans with limited insurance, but even the State itself, given that it is now absorbing 16% of US GDP, twice the proportion of the EU average. Some 60% of US bankruptcies are now related to healthcare costs, and the broad range of US companies now complain that these costs are making them uncompetitive.
While defence of the indefensible US healthcare boondoggle is in full swing over there, here the landscape is less a pitched battle, more the insidious encroachment of corporate vested interests, but nonetheless a relentless struggle continually to extend pervasive corporate influence. The methods used are common to all the industrial lobbies – paying handsome retainers to ex-ministers and fomer top officials (including Alan Milburn, Patricia Hewitt, Sally Morgan, and Michael Barber from the current New Labour stable), sponsoring well-advertised events, underwriting university chairs, and funding an extensive array of lobbyists and interest groups single-mindedly focused on gaining contracts and influencing decision-makers.
That is all about privatising the gains. When the market fails however or recession strikes, the plea is equally strident for socialising the losses. Recent obvious examples include the banks (£1.4 trillion protection paid by the taxpayers to remedy the banks’ own megalomaniac recklessness), pensions (more than £150bn private pension fund liabilities), and construction (desperate pleas for a massive public sector boost to demand with a market at its lowest ebb since 1952). Or, as in the case of pensions, the consistent pressure from the industry over the last 3 decades has been to shut down all State facilities (wind down SERPS in the 1980-90s, and continually whittle down the basic State pension) in order to leave the field clear for privatised pensions, but then, when recession strikes, unilaterally to close down final salary and other good occupational schemes and switch from promised defined benefit pensions to poor-value defined contribution pensions.
It is time that the limits and demerits of privatised services were better recognised, and the greater security and higher quality of public provision were better understood. It would be nice if the Government could take a lead, but alas New Labour is hamstrung by visceral hostility to any idea of public control.

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