Other consequences of the Act include:

• All control for the NHS is handed to  NHS England  and a variety of regulators including; The  Care Quality Commission ,  Healthwatch ,  Health and Wellbeing Boards , The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and  Monitor .
• The Act ended  Primary Care Trusts  and replaced them with  Clinical Commissioning Groups .
• Regional planning was abandoned with the scrapping of  Strategic Health Authorities , which were replaced by NHS England and its 27 or so  Local Area Teams .
• The remaining NHS Hospital Trusts were compelled to become  Foundation Trusts  or merge with (or be taken over by) already established Foundation Trusts.
• Foundation Trusts, which had faced strict limits to the amount of money they could make from private patients (capped at 2 percent), were allowed to make up to half their income from non-NHS work.
• Monitor (the Foundation Trust regulator) was given new powers to regulate the NHS as a whole and to enforce competition and  integration  of services. This diverts funds from emergency care and care of the seriously ill.

Section 75

Section-75 of the Act (signed off by Earl Howe) is designed to create a competitive market in health services. It sets out far-reaching requirements for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to put services out to competitive tender.

Section-75 removed the option for an in-house commissioning process even if local people wish it. CCGs are forced to tender out all contacts even if they feel the local hospital is doing a good job. The legal fees required to facilitate this process cost the NHS approximately £77-million a year.

Section-75 states that there are negligible direct costs to patients, commissioners or providers of competitive tendering. In response David Lock QC wrote:

That statement would be laughable if this were not so serious. Another part of government, the Cabinet Office, has recognised the huge costs of procurement exercises and is complaining that too much cost is imposed by these exercises. This appears to be another case of a total absence of joined up government. Procurement processes are hugely expensive and they delay contracts for extended periods. Conservative MPs ought to have learned that from the West Cost Rail tendering debacle which left the Department for Transport with a bill of £50-million when just one tender exercise went wrong. These regulations will impose countless procurement competitions on the NHS, and cause vast resources to move from patient care into administration.

The 2012 HSCA is effectively the NHS Abolition Act because it paves the way for extensive  privatisation  and break-up of the NHS. This is a consequence of giving away control of the NHS to largely unaccountable bodies, which further enables sweeping changes that would otherwise have had to overcome parliamentary scrutiny (see  Big Picture - Post 2012 NHS Plans ). These changes are rapidly moving us towards the US-style system, like  Medicare , where health services are publicly funded but privately delivered for profit, some of the harmful effects include:

• Worse outcomes for patients.
• Cherry-picking patients to increase profits.
• Greatly increased administration costs arising from the marketisation of the NHS.

  The costs of implementing the reforms in the Act are estimated at £3-billion. A further £1.6-billion was spent on redundancy payments. 4,000 of the managers made redundant were rehired when the Department for Health realised that experienced managers were needed during the transition.

• Destabilisation of the public service.
• Antisocial behaviour by the private sector.
• Loss of accountability and transparency.