NHS hospital loans under PFI in question

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Ah, good ol' PFI...thanks Tony, thanks Mandelson, thank you so fucking much New Labour, you were ace.

A political row has erupted over the legacy of PFI for the health service as one hospital trust faces insolvency.
South London Healthcare, a merger of three hospital trusts, is spending 14% of its income on repayments to a private finance initiative (PFI).
The government says the financial problems are caused by a PFI scheme signed off under Labour.
Labour says there are wider financial pressures in the NHS, and PFI also delivered many new hospitals.
The government could appoint an administrator within weeks. This raises the prospect that other trusts could follow in its wake.
There are another 20 trusts that have declared themselves financially unsustainable in their current form.

PFI in the NHS


Private finance initiatives are partnerships between private companies and public services
The private company stumps up the finance for the public service - in this case, NHS hospitals
PFI offers a way of funding major capital investments, without immediate recourse to the public purse
The NHS then repays the private company under a system of annual fees

(More at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18584968)

[RebelDog]

This is very serious. We all know the executive of the Labour party should be in jail for PFI, but with its enevitable consequence a trust could go bust and that could be a taylor-made pretext to open the doors to private companies. I think there is talk of some kind of national bailout fund for struggling trusts, but I don't trust that either. Tories don't bailout things they hate. I imagine most of that money would end up as profit for healthcare companies. This is bad news for the NHS as a whole.

[JPSartre12]

I just wish that we had something along the lines of the NHS here in the United States. I can't grasp why universal healthcare is even debatable.