The John Lewis chain has announced that it is going into partnership with Randox Health. It will start offering a range of Randox services in its stores, with health checks starting from £295.
Naomi Simcock, the head of the John Lewis chain, said: “In Randox we have an experienced and innovative partner to extend our range of in-store services, to help customers proactively manage their health and wellbeing.”
Of course these services will only be available to people who are able and willing to pay prices starting at £295 for their checkups. In other words, further normalisation of private healthcare for the wealthier workers is taking place.
This has already happened with dentistry. As the supply of NHS dentists has dried up, those same dentists have transferred as many patients as possible onto private plans, leaving only those least able to pay without adequate access to dentistry. Meanwhile, those who are able to pay are now paying much more for their dentistry than before.
With the waiting list for elective treatments on the NHS in England standing at 7.7million cases, there’s a lot of room for private companies to snatch away disgruntled patients. Once private healthcare has been normalised for those better off in our society, we’ll have a widely implemented two tier system of health care.
Surely, this move to work with private health providers will boost John Lewis’s profits. It’s another warning sign for us, though, of the dangerous direction that our health system is heading in.
Access to healthcare should be a human right and it’s more than possible for a society as wealthy as ours to provide it. It’s a political choice to underfund the NHS and allow profit seeking companies to prey on our communities. It’s up to us to fight back!
