@ Naomi I agree with you that PFI is madness, but to try and equate signing up for it as being a sign that the respective NHS administrations are devoid of business nous or just amateurs is simply wrong. PFI was a political initiative, and trusts and boards "invited" and encouraged by the Department of Health to enter into them.
PFI was introduced by Major's conservative administration, the principle behind the introduction being the decidedly none -socialist view that capital investments should be moved off the assets/liabilities book of the State ; it was also seen as a way of roping in private sector investment. New Labour enthusiastically embraced it, seeing it as a quick way of improving the NHS estate - and schools too, come to that.
Still, no one could accuse New Labour of being a socialist administration ;)
This was introducing capitalism and free market principles into the NHS which is a mistake for anything as fundamental as this. Such market ethos might have a role in non-core services and elements supplementary to their main role of healthcare, but that should be the extent of it, in my opinion.
Now we see all sorts of health services put out to tender (costing time and money), and stories of companies walking away from their contracts or being unable to offer the level of service required because either they failed to cost it properly, or were just desperate to get the business and willing to submit a quotation not consistent with what was needed, hoping to get bailed out by the state when they owned up. ( And this does not just happen in the health service either; bus services, rail services, security contracts have all been walked away from).
@Modeller No, I would not necessarily be surprised that you have had exposure to either "socialist thinking" ( which itself implies that all socialist thinking is the same, which it is not) and "soviet bloc" countries ( which were never socialist). I am more concerned that the title of this thread is wrong on both factual and ideological levels, and that you continue to defend a story of an individual motivated by greed exploiting lax management and audit systems as being indicative of the whole of state run business or socialist ideology, when it is clearly nothing of the sort.
Nor have you offered anything resembling support for the equating "socialism" with cancer, which is a pretty unpleasant and inflammatory assertion.
@Emmie. You may think of yourself as unpartisan, or middle of the road, but having engaged in many threads with you across a wide range of differing subjects, that is most certainly not my impression.