@Givingup123456 Contracts to provide specific services - stuff like CAT scans, blood tests, long term palliative care, patient transport, cleaning, whatever - can go to in-house NHS facilities, or external facilities run by private companies. Private companies that have no duty of care, and can be run by unscrupulous bastards. Or that are great, either is possible. One is more likely though.
Give enough of those contracts out to private companies, and the government can say "well, the NHS needs less money because it's providing less services" and suddenly local trusts need to shut down A&Es in some hospitals, or consolidate cardiac care to a single big-town hospital instead of having wards at various places, and suddenly patients are having to be carted an hour away and dying on the way.
This "failure of the NHS" is then cited as a reason to pass off even more facilities to private run companies, and the circle continues until only the most central services are still being provided by the stunted leftover of the NHS, and everything else is being provided (often badly and without clinical and regulatory oversight) by the lowest private bidder, now being paid directly from the Government coffers.
Now go check the register of interests for MPs, and see how many of them are involved in private healthcare companies as board members... and how many ex-MPs end up on those boards after being involved with NHS contract allocation.
And that, my children, is how the taxpayer's money goes straight to corrupt MP's pockets.