Documentary film. Running time 126 minutes.
Director: Drew McFadyen
Producers: Drew McFadyen ,Dr Bob Gill
Written by Dr Bob Gill & Drew McFadyen.
Narration by Peter Egan
Filmed in 4K UHD Post production carried out on 4K
workflow and edited using BlackMagic Designs Davinci Resolve
Drew McFadyen Director, Filmmaker and writer
Film maker activist. Drew has been making films on and off for many years.
He came back to film making as therapy after a number of health issues
and a serious concern about the direction Britain is headed. He is
passionate about disability and mental health campaigns. “The Great NHS
Heist has been a mission of project.” He filmed, recorded sound, edited and
co-wrote this film. When the going has been tough He tried to focus on how
important it is to inform the public about the appalling hijacking
of our NHS.
THE GREAT NHS HEIST is a Crowd funded film made By Drew McFadyen, who after having faced the impact of a failing health system. Offered to help dr Bob Gill in his campaign. Drew Produced over 60 items of program content. The Great NHS Heist film, its web site, its marketing, and the Theatrical trailer, along with accompanying Dr Gill on numerous events to support his presentations. Drew suffers from complex post traumatic disorder. And other long term health conditions. Filmmaking is seen by Drew as therapy. It is a focusing process that allows him to try and better manage the often debilitating effects of his complex post traumatic stress disorder.. He is passionate about mental health rights and the impact on people with hidden disabilities.
” After filming and editing down some 60 hours of interviews and footage. Every frame of that film is part of me. Making a film trying to capture a complete picture of how the NHS has been stealthily stolen from us and our forefathers who paid taxes to build and fund the NHS, became an obsession . I also felt a great deal of responsibility to the supporters of the crowd funder & the project. And grateful that their support allowed the film to be made. I particularly appreciated the support and encouragement that David Graeber gave during the project. He followed my progress closely and was kind enough to let me film the interview with him last so i could use the questions to him as a sort of skeleton to tie everything together. At the premier I was speaking to david after and he said “Urm, I was in it quite a bit, but i thought it was good” He was a great bloke and i still miss him lots.
I want to make more films as health allows. I hope, that putting my heart and soul in to getting the film finished would be the catalyst to bring attention to his filmmaking and get the support that is required to make films on contentious subjects like mental health human rights ethics and other subjects which don’t attract comercial money” – Drew McFadyen.
Dr Bob Gill NHS Campaigner
Qualified at University of Sheffield in 1993 and has been a General
Practitioner in Sidcup since 2003. Following cuts to local NHS services and
witnessing the decline of patient care he became a campaigner against NHS
privatisation, in 2012 joined the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and in
2014 produced a documentary film Sell Off. He has spoken at public
meetings across the country and appeared on broadcast media speaking on
the threat to the NHS.
THE GREAT NHS HEIST, exposes the covert destruction of the English National Health Service. Post-war Atlee’s government implemented Aneurin Bevan’s ambition of an NHS in July 1948. It meant everyone in Britain could get free medical care and this successful revolutionary social advance was copied across the world.
From the beginning there was strong political opposition and from the British Medical Association. Throughout Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, forces determined to replace the NHS with an American style, profit making, private insurance-based system gathered momentum. In Britain’s Biggest Enterprise (1988) Oliver Letwin MP outlined the plan which required stealth, complexity, deception and co-operation of consecutive governments to avoid a public backlash. We witnessed the new corporate managerialism and marketisation of healthcare, shrinkage of the NHS bed capacity, and transfer of assets into the private sector using Private Finance Initiative and NHS land sales. Private operators expanding their grip on the NHS, securing contracts for the provision of ancillary and then clinical services, rapidly accelerated by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. The privatisation lobby crafted effective cover stories and carefully managed the national debate to maintain public ignorance and remained largely unchallenged by a compliant mainstream media. Successive reforms were presented as essential improvements while disguising the reality of creeping privatisation. The stage was set for the heist of NHS land, patient medical data, and the £120 billion annual tax-funded budget for US corporate raiders.
The American medical-industrial complex is expensive, dysfunctional and endemically fraudulent yet it is the model being replicated in England. Over thirty million Americans have no medical insurance or government funded care, millions more also financially ruined by medical bills despite having insurance. Hospital providers over investigate and over treat to increase profits by defrauding and potentially harming the sick – while insurers try to avoid seriously ill and expensive people and deny payments when policyholders become too costly. In America, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality measures are much worse than in other countries where expenditure on healthcare is vastly lower.
Nevertheless health policy in England has accelerated in the wrong direction under the cover of austerity. Chief Executive of NHS England, Mr Simon Stevens, former head of global expansion for US health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, has progressed the insurance industry designed changes in the NHS, introducing their personnel, IT systems and business methods. The final legal changes to create American Health Maintenance Organisation models, called Integrated Care Systems, are underway. Aligning financial incentives for providers with those of insurers to increase profits by the denial of care to the sick.
Patients, health professionals, campaigners and experts from England and America deliver a comprehensive exposé of the three-decade long heist of our nation’s proudest achievement, as summed up in this warning from former US insurance industry executive turned whistleblower, Wendell Potter: “In this country we scare people by saying we don’t want to go down the slippery slope to socialised medicine. Well I tell you something, (what) scares me even worse is going down the slippery slope to the American healthcare system.”
