This comes from Health Emergency and is pretty scary.

The Con-Dem coalition could bring the end of the NHS as we know it – by 2015, according to pressure group London Health Emergency, which has been campaigning since 1983.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has set his sights on reducing the NHS from a public service delivering health care to a fund that commissions care from a range of private providers in the new White Paper unveiled yesterday.

Tens of thousands of staff face redundancy with the scrapping of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities: tens of thousands more who are delivering front-line health care will also lose their jobs, beginning this year, as £20 billion of “efficiency savings” are pushed through faster than planned, by 2014.

Increasing numbers of health workers in NHS Trusts and community health services who keep their jobs will find themselves against their will working for so-called “social enterprises,” with the loss of their NHS pay scale, pensions and conditions of service.

Many others working for Foundation Trusts could also face the loss of national NHS pay and conditions, and see their Trust bosses cashing in on government plans to lift the cap on income from pay beds, private medicine, and deals with private companies. Andrew Lansley has made clear his wish to go further and make Foundation Trusts “off balance sheet” as completely external providers to the NHS – meaning that their staff, too, would cease to be NHS employees. All Trusts have to be Foundations by 2013.

Meanwhile by scrapping any local or regional planning mechanism, and handing £70 billion of commissioning budgets to local consortia of GPs, ministers are opening up a chaotic competitive market, but also the prospect of a new “postcode lottery” for patients and the widening of inequalities in health provision — as happened when the Tories last experimented expensively and unsuccessfully with GP Fundholding in the 1990s.

But even the illusion of new powers and freedoms for GPs as commissioners is punctured by the context of massive spending cuts, coupled with the threat that GPs will be held accountable for the consequences of their decisions, and required to take unpopular decisions on cuts and closures of local services. Ministers insist that there will be no bail-outs for organisations which overspend public budgets.

London Health Emergency director Dr John Lister said:

“This new set of policies builds on all the worst elements of the previous government’s so-called reforms.

“It will establish even more private providers making profit from the public purse, while NHS staff could become a virtually extinct species in England.

“Any GPs who really believe that they can deliver improved care for their patients in this type of health competitive market are kidding themselves.

“Some campaigners have wrongly cried ‘wolf’ at earlier reform packages, but this White Paper leaves every previous attempt at privatisation and marketisation standing. This time we really are facing the end of the NHS as we know it – by 2015.

“Now is the time for every health union, professional body, pensioners’ group, campaigner and member of the public to get together to force the Con-Dems to back off.”