Simon Stevens

Simon Stevens, is chief executive of NHS England. Formerly, he was executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group. Prior to that he was Downing St adviser.

Almost two years after vacating his post, Stevens is still on the select list of people invited to dine with Blair at Chequers. As health policy advisor to Frank Dobson, Alan Milburn and Tony Blair, Stevens was widely seen as the author of the NHS Plan, which in 2000 set course towards increased privatisation and market-style reforms. Stepping out of Downing Street in 2004, he moved swiftly and seamlessly into the private sector. He had been in touch with UnitedHealth (UHE) Europe for the previous two years, during which time they landed their first NHS contract.

Stevens is now reportedly pocketing a salary of £150,000 as president of UnitedHealth Europe, and his bosses in the US clearly feel it is worth paying so highly for his services. As the architect behind the controversial ‘modernisation’ of the NHS, Stevens has a clear view of the most promising and profitable targets for UHE’s activities. Not surprisingly, UHE has not even bothered trying to replicate its role in private health insurance, which is a mainstay of its highly profitable US parent company – whose annual turnover is almost £16 billion. The existence of the NHS with its universal health cover has left private medical insurance as a relatively marginal activity in the UK, covering just 12 per cent of the population.

Instead, like a shark scenting fresh blood, UHE, steered by Stevens and by its chief executive, former British Medical Journal editor, Richard Smith, has zeroed in on much bigger prey – the juicy prospect of controlling hundreds of millions of pounds in the commissioning budgets of primary care trusts. The possibility of opening up this vast source of income for companies such as UHE was created by New Labour’s determined efforts to establish market-style competition in the health service – as proposed by Simon Stevens. Still only 39, Stevens’ career has been characterised by a whistle-stop progress. His university education was at Oxford, Strathclyde and New York’s Ivy League Columbia university. According to his CV on the UHE website, he has since managed to slot in appearances as a ‘health authority director, general manager of a mental health service, and a group manager at Guy’s and St Thomas’s university hospitals’ in addition to working in Africa, South America and the USA. All this before spending seven years as the government’s health policy advisor from the age of 30.

Having acquired a passing acquaintance with sections of the NHS, Stevens now writes regularly for the influential management weekly, Health Service Journal, and has also managed to secure himself an academic niche as visiting professor at the London School of Economics. The LSE connection also furnished the government with Stevens’ successor as health advisor, the rabidly pro-market Julian Le Grand. Stevens, whose official biographical notes say that his policy interests include ‘strengthening the healthcare “payer”/purchaser function’, has shown himself a much smoother operator than Le Grand, whose appointment as health advisor triggered a noisy moan from public sector unions. Stevens and Richard Smith have been willing to meet and debate with Unison and other unions, attempting to present an acceptable face of commercial medicine and privatised care.

Affiliations

• King's Fund