A recent report by an auditor of NHS services has found that the NHS has written off $8.8m Dollars of work done for private companies and Governments, in just four NHS Trusts.

BBC NEWS | Health | Millions lost in NHS private fees

Great Ormond Street Hospital alone wrote of $6m dollars worth of debt owed for work done for private concerns.

Some of the outstanding debts are from the Kuwaiti Government, a Greek insurance company amd Bupa, one of the larger insurance companies in Britain.

For anyone that doesn't know, there are about 50-60 NHS Trusts in the UK, all of varying sizes.

Ok, so we're talking about something along the lines of $100 million altogether right then, approximately? How long was this over?

I want to know why they're doing private jobs in the first place. Foreigners fair enough, it's pretty difficult to realise straight away that they need to be charged, and if there's a guy dying they're going to treat now and charge later. But what's with this other private work? They're NHS trusts, that stuff should be used as part of their normal service, not for profit.

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... I am surprised at your insolence in writing to me at all. You know, as I know, that I bought this constituency... may God's curse light upon you and may it make your women as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your scoundrel corporation.
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- MPs reply to constituent, mid 1700s

It is this desire by Government to make every public department turn a profit for someone.

You can't 'sell' the NHS Trusts to a consortium of financers, without generating profit for them, the only way to really generate profit from the NHS (without directly giving Taxpayers money to these people) is to hire out the services it provides to private insurance companies.

Now money can be generated that doesn't come directly from the taxpayer, but which the taxpayer created, that they can siphon off without a lot of bad press. If they just took directly from the budget of the NHS Trust, people would be peeved that our tax money was going straight into private pockets.

There is supposed to be a good reason, the reason being that once the financers get involved they help streamline the running of the NHS Trust to maximise profits, thus helping the NHS to run efficiently.

The problem is the financers do not care about level of care.

Which is why we had a Hospital in Kent with 90 avoidable deaths, due to a lack of good cleaning, purely on the basis that the financers found that transient, untrained labour was far far cheaper so used that instead. The fact that transient untrained labour didn't do the job properly, was not an issue that was high on their agenda. Until 90 people died and the press got involved.

It is strange that they can take our taxes, spend it on services, then sell those services privately for a profit and that doesn't seem to bother too many people.

It didn't seem to bother too many when they did the same thing to the Water, Electric, Phone, Army Housing etc etc etc. So I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by this either.