Sunak vs Truss: where do they stand on healthcare?
IMAGE CREDIT: PA
The Conservative Party leadership race is on - and it’s between former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. The winner will be announced in early September following a vote by Conservative party members.
Whoever replaces Boris Johnson as the next Prime Minister will have to contend with a number of critical challenges - not least the unprecedented crisis facing our National Health Service. Despite this, last night’s first head-to-head TV debate between the candidates saw barely even a mention of the NHS, let alone any proposals to properly support it.
Hospital waiting list figures are the highest on record whilst 12-hour trolley waits are soaring. England is short of 12000 hospital doctors and over 50000 nurses & midwives, with many more leaving due to worsening pay and conditions. Services are struggling to cope with the ongoing pressures of the COVID crisis, more than two years after the pandemic began.
In light of this, what can we expect from those vying to become the next leader of this country? What action - if any - will they take to protect our NHS? And what do their past activities tell us about their priorities when it comes to healthcare? Let’s take a look…👇
Rishi Sunak
Sunak is clearly seeking to pitch himself as the economically “responsible” candidate in this election. What this would almost certainly mean in reality is a return to an era of austerity - and that’s always bad news for public services such as health.
In Autumn last year Sunak did announce almost £6bn of funding to tackle England’s record NHS waiting list - but this was no way near enough to address the gaping shortfalls in our health service. For context, we would need £33bn a year of additional funding to match the spending levels seen in France and Germany, in order to match or surpass their numbers of health workers, beds and scanners.
In the months following this announcement, the waiting list crisis only worsened, and Sunak took a tougher line on further health spending. His 2022 Spring Budget allocated zero extra funding for the NHS, despite desperate pleas from NHS staff, patients and campaigners. What’s more, around the same time Sunak announced he was doubling the NHS’s annual savings target from 1.1% to 2.2%, leaving NHS trusts to try and cut costs despite facing immense and growing pressures to deliver on patient care.
Beyond funding, Sunak has also been criticised for shady meetings with private corporations seeking to profit from patients and the NHS. In December 2021 it was revealed he met with US healthcare company Grail, owned by Illumina - for which David Cameron is a paid adviser - to learn about tech being rolled out to NHS patients.
As one of the richest MPs in Parliament (worth hundreds of millions of pounds), Sunak also has connections to a number of lucrative businesses beyond his parliamentary work which have come under scrutiny. For example, back in 2020 he refused to say if he would personally profit from the rollout of the COVID vaccine produced by Moderna - a company in which Sunak’s former hedge fund invested heavily. Earlier in the same year he was questioned by the Shadow Chancellor over his connections to TCI Fund Management, which has had links to privatised healthcare and appears to have been part of a web of companies with Cayman Islands links.
Liz Truss
In contrast to Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss has made grand promises about cutting taxes and avoiding austerity whilst meeting fiscal rules, despite the fact that many experts have claimed this is not possible. She has also explicitly pledged to scrap the health and social care levy, put in place by Boris Johnson to fund the NHS and social care - but has not proposed how she would make up the gap in health funding, let alone address further shortfalls that urgently need tackling.
Her time as International Trade Secretary also gave many cause for concern about the future of the NHS. Despite the fact that she consistently claimed that the NHS was “off the table” for any trade agreement, leaked papers revealed that the NHS and drug prices were very much part of ongoing talks with the US.
Truss has shown that she won’t shy away from prioritising the interests of profiteering corporations over the needs of patients and the NHS. For example, she has almost always voted against restricting the provision of services to private patients by the NHS. She’s also consistently refused to back the waiving of big pharma’s intellectual property rights that have disastrously restricted global access to COVID vaccines, despite calls from over 100+ countries and a growing global campaign for a People’s Vaccine.
Finally, it's worth noting that Truss has built up a reputation for standing at the much more socially regressive side of the Conservative Party. These views will likely put the rights - including the right to health - of marginalised communities at greater risk if she were to become Prime Minister. For example, in 2020 she was condemned for effectively planning to remove young trans people’s access to healthcare. And just last week, she came under fire over the removal of commitments to abortion and sexual health rights from an official statement on gender equality - which was done without any explanation.
So whilst their economic approaches may differ, both Sunak and Truss represent more bad news for patients and the NHS. Neither have so far committed to delivering the major investment our health service desperately needs to cope with the pressures it’s facing. And both have shown time and again that they are happy to act in the interests of private companies seeking to profit from our ill health.
The leadership contest has so far featured alarmingly little discussion of the crisis in healthcare, despite the fact that it’s impacting so many across the country. Right now, millions of NHS patients are struggling to access the care they need. For some, this crisis has already cost their lives.
Both NHS patients and staff deserve so much better than this - and we must demand it from our political leaders. Take action with us by calling on Sunak and Truss to commit to protecting the right to health!