The party said that the NHS should not be deregulated and opened to market forces in the same way as electricity, gas or telecommunications.
Shadow Health Secretary John Healey warned: “Competition law means that if there are grounds for a legal challenge to providers or commissioners, the GPs and hospitals talking to each other about the planning of services, how they should be provided, including inevitably aspects of the cost of that, as part of their necessary discussions, that could clearly be regarded as anti-competitive, collusive possibly even cartel practices that a court-happy private health company could use lawyers to challenge.”
An NHS economic regulatory body with similar powers to the Office of Fair Trading will enforce English and EU competition law and any NHS body deemed to have breached competition law, by unfairly favouring one provider over others, can be fined 10 per cent of their annual turnover.
But the new structure will lead to GPs and hospital feeling compelled to divert resources to health care and legal advice, Mr Healey warned.
The British Medical Association, at a special conference just days after Liberal Democrat delegates registered their own unhappiness with the measures at their spring conference, attacked large portions of the legislation as “ill-thought-out”, “implemented in a rush”, “contradictory”, “driven by ideology not evidence in a major economic downturn” and called for “evolution, not revolution”.
When challenged at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons by Labour leader Ed Miliband on the wide-ranging and diverse opposition to the bill, Prime Minister David Cameron dismissed the BMA’s concerns as those of just another trade union resisting public sector reform.
He accused the Opposition leader of reading the BMA’s press release to support the sectional interests of just another trade union.
