While dubious mortality rates grab headlines, NHS privatisation gallops on | Polly Toynbee

While dubious mortality rates grab headlines, NHS privatisation gallops on | Polly Toynbee The ferocity of the battle over 'dangerous' hospitals was not synthetic. The future of the NHS itself is under attack.

The symbolism runs deep into the veins of the NHS. The government on Thursday sold off the NHS-owned company supplying safe blood plasma on which thousands depend. It was sold to a US private equity firm with a reputation for aggressive asset-stripping. Bain Capital owns Burger King, Domino's Pizza, Dunkin' Donuts and much else. Its predatory history dogged Bain's founder, Mitt Romney, throughout the US election.

After contamination by brain disease variant CJD, sourcing plasma from UK donors was banned in 1999, so the NHS purchased its own supplier – PRUK – to regulate quality and safety itself. Campaigners fought to stop a sell-off to a profit-hungry business beyond NHS control. Alarming footnote: I rang the Department of Health press office to find out more, but instead of returning my call I was outsourced – I got a call from Bain's PR company instead.

Privatising gallops on mostly unseen. But people do see blaring headlines claiming 13,000 people died needlessly in 14 dangerous hospitals. The ferocity of the ensuing political battle looked to outsiders like an unedifying scrap over dead bodies. The Tory ambush was pre-planned by Downing Street as well-primed MPs used a report by Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS medical director, to turn Labour's good NHS record into a liability. Labour's outrage was not synthetic, but indignation within the NHS was even fiercer at seeing the progress of the last decade trashed. The attack was not just on Labour, but on the viability and the future of the NHS itself.

Where did that 13,000 come from? Not from Keogh's meticulous report. With an innocent face, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, protested: "I don't know how that number was put out there." It came from No 10 briefers, and was quickly refuted by Keogh, who called it "clinically meaningless and academically reckless". It was also promoted by Professor Sir Brian Jarman, author of the Dr Foster hospital guide.

Professor Sir Mike Rawlins, recent chair of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), new president of the Royal Society of Medicine, is crisp in his dismissal: "To claim, as Brian Jarman has done, thousands of deaths, is a complete distortion of the statistics."

What's wrong with the figure? Rawlins says it catches what's above average – and some always will be. Then, there are two sets of mortality figures, each calculated on separate bases – with different results. Rawlins points to difficulties: "If an area has no hospice, more die in hospital. In other areas, measuring those who die within 30 days of leaving hospital needs to note how many are released to a hospice. How old is the population? How many on low-incomes? These are never easy to measure." He agrees mortality figures are important for raising questions – but they don't give easy answers.

The well-respected new chief inspector of hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards, just announced his inspection plan. He is drawing up "a small army" of professional and lay teams to rate hospitals, reveal poor care and help to resolve it. When I talked to him on Thursday he was delighted with an avalanche of offers of help from hundreds of clinicians. Asked about the mortality figures, he says he uses them "as a smoke alarm". But measurement matters and he will use over 100 metrics to judge hospitals.

Isn't that like Labour's targets, so aggressively attacked and dumped by this government? What about Labour's record, now being rubbished? He bristles: "Remember where we were before then, with people waiting on cardiac lists for 18 months? In cancer, people waited far too long. We had to deal with a real problem with waiting times. Targets worked." He was cancer tsar, responsible for a rapid improvement in results. How was it done? By setting a target for improvement by 2005. "It happened fast in that low-spending NHS year, so we didn't throw money at it, just applied pressure." On Labour's watch there was a 30% cut in "amenable mortality rates". Targets stopped 4% of people dying on cardiac waiting lists. Stroke victims became 25% more likely to survive. Measurements and treatments are, he says, "much better than they were".

But there may be trouble ahead. His success in cancer relied on co-operation, so a cancer pathway might see one hospital specialise in diagnosis, another in surgery and a third in chemotherapy. How does that fit with hospital competition ordained by the new NHS act? Some clinical commissioning groups refuse to commission these pathways, breaking them up. Richards's teams will prescribe remedies for failing hospitals, which might need mergers or co-working. But that's not permitted under the new act. Monitors' duty to stop anti-competitive behaviour is already preventing Bournemouth and Poole merging, seeing them referred to the Office of Fair Trading. So how will Richards confront that roadblock? He chooses his words with great care: "Let's see where we get on that. I am sure the public will insist quality trumps everything else. But I don't imagine it's going to be easy."

Influential NHS leaders won't allow the record of recent years to be rubbished. Of course, the NHS isn't good enough: I have my own family tales of bad nursing care, but also of good. But it is judged by anecdote: some patients cling beyond reason to beloved bad hospitals, while for others an atypical bad experience rattles round family and friends for years. In the end, neither anecdote nor politically engineered scares but Richards's 100 metrics will matter most, measuring good cures, genuinely avoidable deaths, and patient satisfaction.

The government has two winters to survive to the election without A&E or waiting-list explosions, so if they went away thinking they "won" on the NHS, they shouldn't count their chickens.