Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen,

and our special guest, Phil Hammond.

We are here for, I mean, there's going to be an election at some point, an NHS pre-election

special which will become relevant at some point in the next 10 months we are assuming.

So Phil, we wanted to ask you all sorts of questions

Adam's got a growth that he wants you to look at it's cancer and you'll be dead in the

fortnight no we just thought it would be fun to get you in kind of like a reverse what's my line.

That's a good reference for the younger listeners there.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

But Phil, you are MD as listeners of this podcast will know already.

We wanted to get you in, ask you,

first of all, you've written something really

interesting recently about privatization.

And there's a lot of discussion of NHS privatization.

Is it being privatized by stealth? Is it not? What's your take on it?

Well the particular article I wrote, I was sent a leaked email from the President of the

Royal College of Ophthalmologists who was making the point that over 50% of cataracts are now done by private providers

and often it won't go anywhere near an NHS GP so you can go to spec savers now and

they pick up you've got a cataract and they can refer you to a private provider.

The issue there is that some of the private providers have links to spec savers and other private

...