HEALTH Secretary Jeremy Hunt held meetings with US private health giant Kaiser Permanente last year — but the Department of Health is determined to keep any details of the meetings secret.

The department listed the two appointments between Jeremy Hunt and Kaiser Permanente in January and March 2014 on their regular register of “ministers’ meetings with external organisations.” They admitted that Hunt was having what they called “healthcare discussions” with Kaiser Permanente executives.

Hunt talking to Kaiser is a big deal because Kaiser is one of the biggest players in the insurance-based, privatised US health market. Is Hunt finding out how to make our NHS more like the US profit-based health system?

This would be very worrying, because Kaiser has been caught making revenue in two very bad ways.

First, the firm has repeatedly been charged with “patient dumping” — with keeping ill, expensive people out of its hospitals. This can be done by literally driving sick homeless people to other institutions, or by unqualified call centre staff advising patients to keep away, or by the firm claiming that its insurance doesn’t cover some medical conditions. In 2013 Kaiser paid a $3.75 million (£2.44m) fine in California because they kept mental health patients waiting so long that some committed suicide before they were seen.

California’s Department of Managed Health Care found that Kaiser systemically understaffed its psychiatry department, falsified patient records to conceal long wait times and misled patients about what care was available.

The firm then overclaimed money from the limited US social health systems, Medicare and Medicaid.

In 2009 Kaiser paid a $3.75m fine to settle allegations that it was submitting false bills to Medicaid in California

In the same year Kaiser’s Oregon office paid a $1.8m (£1.2m) fine because the US Department of Justice caught them claiming money for hospice care for patients who were not certified as having terminal illnesses.

So there are good reasons to ask what Jeremy and Kaiser chat about.

I asked the Department of Health, under freedom of information rules, for any documents they had relating to the meetings. They replied: “The department does not hold any information relevant to your request.”

I know this is wrong. The Secretary of State for Health couldn’t have held two meetings with an international corporation and leave no trace of them at all. So I asked again, this time just for details of who went to the meetings and where they happened — information that should be found in diaries or emails or other documents that the department claimed did not exist. Knowing which civil servants accompanied the Health Secretary to meet which Kaiser Permanente staff could give a little glimpse into the mind of Jeremy Hunt.

But the department is determined to keep the contents of Hunt’s brain secret.

It finally admitted that “the department holds information relevant to your request,” but claimed that this information must be secret to create what they call a “safe space” for Jeremy in his “private office.”

It claims that Hunt’s staff would be too bothered by “external considerations, such as the possible public perception of any arrangements” to do their job properly — their proper job being to arrange meetings with firms like Kaiser Permanente. So “the balance of public interest favours withholding this information.”

Closer to la casta

THE current HSBC revelations bring us closer to seeing a British version of what Spanish radical party Podemos call “la casta,” or “the caste.”

Spain is so angry about what they call a “political caste that uses the public to enrich themselves” that the brand new left-wing party is close to government. This cast is part of a “dense network of client relations” which ensured that “institutions served large companies” at public cost. In Spain, corporations got big public contracts, didn’t pay tax, but did buy off politicians, an ugly scene exposed by financial collapse.

The link between rule-breaking, profiteering firms and politicians is strong in the HSBC case. But I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate and expand on some other members of the caste taking the stage. Ed Miliband is promising some very weak reforms, but the British caste are enraged by even the smallest promise of change.

So Sir Stuart Rose attacked Miliband, saying that he wanted “punitive taxes” on business and “sky-high taxes, overregulation and business-bashing.”

Rose has many jobs, including being a senior adviser to HSBC in Europe. So Rose works for the bank at the centre of the tax avoidance scandal. Rose joined HSBC in September 2013 to advise on retail banking.

Rose is also on the board of Bridgepoint Capital, which owns firms making money from NHS privatisation — particularly Care UK and Alliance Medical. They make money from the NHS, but Bridgepoint’s financial engineering keeps their tax bill low.

Former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn is also on the board of Bridgepoint. He has exploited his role as a Labour minister to become an NHS privatiser.

Milburn also works for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants who make millions from exploitative forms of privatisation like private finance initiatives (PFI).

Another of Miliband’s attackers, Baron John Hutton, was also a former Labour health minister (and Milburn’s old flatmate). He works for NHS privatiser Circle Health, which made money from poor treatment of patients. Hutton is also a ppecial adviser to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The current attacks on Miliband were started by Monaco-based billionaire owner of Boots the Chemist, Stefano Pessina. He made sure that Boots escaped paying lots of tax. One of Boots’s main advisers on tax is none other than PricewaterhouseCoopers — the firm that MPs recently accused of selling tax avoidance on an “industrial scale” and the same firm employing Hutton and Milburn.

We have the “dense network” of profiteers already, what we need is the radical, Podemos-style response.