Last week saw the biggest leak in the history of the U.K. National Health Service – and the next chapter in what many are calling the “stealth” privatization of the NHS – with the publication of a document revealing that clinical commissioning groups looked for a private company to accept a £1.2 billion contract for cancer care in Staffordshire.

It is the highest value contract ever offered by the NHS, which essentially gives the winning bidder carte blanche to slash and restructure services as they wish, with light-touch NHS supervision for the first two years, and then total control awarded to the company. Campaigners fear this market freedom will mean profit gets easily prioritized over patient care.

Commissioners say that cancer care in the area is failing and that the privatization deal is the only way to save it. However, figures from the commissioners themselves show that cancer care in Staffordshire is already above average in the U.K. Consultation on the proposal took the form of a brief series of “engagement events” led by paid “patient champions,” which campaigners say were badly publicized and therefore slipped under the radar for most patients, let alone being accessible to the public.

It's the first time that NHS proposals for putting cancer or end-of-life care out for tender have been revealed – yet the entire process seems to have been shrouded in secrecy.

Occupy.com contacted Gail Gregory, a spokesperson for the campaign group Cancer Not for Profit, and her husband Mike Gregory, who is a cancer patient in Staffordshire. “A private company cannot possibly have patients at the core of its work – it's out to make money,” insisted Ms. Gregory.

“There's a lot of evidence that privatization does more harm than good. We've seen Spire Healthcare botching breast cancer operations; Atos Healthcare pulling out of its contract in Tower Hamlets because it wasn't making enough money; Hinchingbrooke Hospital being handed back to the NHS because Circle Healthcare didn't make enough money; records for the out-of-hours services in Cornwall falsified by Serco… the list goes on. Everywhere you look there are privatized healthcare contracts going belly-up.”

Gregory believes the lack of information available to patients and the public was a definite sign that the NHS knew it was doing something wrong. “If you have utter confidence that something you're proposing is going to be beneficial, but you recognize it will be controversial, you need to embark upon a massive campaign to get people on your side by explaining to them what you're going to do and what the implications of it are,” she said.

“But that hasn't been done, and when people keep me in the dark it leaves me with an overwhelming feeling that they're keeping me in the dark because they know that if I was in the light I wouldn't like what they were doing. They say there were consultations but Mike was a patient at the time and he was told nothing about it. There were no notices up, no invitations, nobody going round the cancer treatment units, nothing from staff.”

For eight years, her husband, Mike Gregory, has been undergoing treatment for cancer, and he is now concerned his treatment will be disrupted by the changes. “I'm assuming in the best case scenario I'm going to be treated by exactly the same people who are treating me now, but if the same people are doing the treatments and someone else is pulling the chain then what's the point?” he said.

“Any private company has a bottom line of making money and some of that money must come out of what would otherwise have been spent treating patients.”

Mr. Gregory is uneasy with the idea that a private company could eventually have free reign to decide his fate, unsupervised by the NHS. “The nature of this tender is that after a couple of years, whoever is granted this contract is going to go it alone. I don't see that there's anything at that point to stop the management of this company farming out its services to whoever it likes,” he said.

Dr. Jacky Davis, a radiographer and author of a new book, "NHS For Sale, Myths, Lies and Deception," told Occupy.com:

"What is shocking is that [Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley] promised more transparency and accountability, not to mention 'No decision about me without me.' What we have instead is secrecy, commercial confidentiality, lack of consultation, blatant disregard for public opinion, profits before patients, and everything tilted towards the private sector and a process that patients certainly don't want – if local campaigns are anything to go by.

"Why should such a contract, spending taxpayers' money on services for the same taxpayers, be secret? Why should it have to be smuggled out and published illicitly?" she said.

The degree of public opposition to the privatization plans is clear; a 38 Degrees petition that went live last Thursday already boasts over 57,000 signatures. However, recent history would suggest that current levels of public protest are having little effect on the Coalition Government's plan to destroy what Gail Gregory described as “the finest thing that was ever built for [the U.K.].”

If something doesn't change drastically, and soon, the U.K. may find its most vulnerable citizens victim to the same unequal, profit-driven health insurance system as people in the United States.

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