The National Health Service is probably the single greatest achievement of a British government in history, founded under the Labour government of Clement Atlee in 1948 it insured free healthcare for everybody in Britain.
In Western Europe and the United States we see insurance schemes, masses of paper work that people need to worry about, yet here we only have to worry about the treatment, not how we’re going to pay for it or if our particular insurance scheme or company health policies cover the treatment we need. In many ways it is a model the rest of the world should follow.
The Tories have systematically tried to discredit and run down the NHS. They don’t like the idea of something being run in the public interest, with no place to make any money for shareholders. They attack it, not to try and improve it, but to try and get rid of it. Ten years ago the Tory anti-NHS machine was in full swing; fortunately thanks to NHS funding being almost tripled the NHS has survived.
However nowadays the struggle comes in a more subtle form, and disappointingly has been spearheaded by the New Labour government. We see privatisation slowly creeping over the NHS, this not only transfers public money and puts it into the pockets of private business, it also drains other resources from the NHS, like staff and equipment, we see this particularly hard in dentistry, where I’ve heard stories of some practises in Yeovil trying to push patients off the NHS and onto private. It also risks a huge conflict of interest, instead of getting people back on their feet, with private business involved there no doubt would be at least some temptation to keep people ill for longer to make more money out of them.
Willing to admit it or not, the Tories and some Liberals would no doubt would like to see the NHS dissolved, or completely privatised and some sort of insurance scheme setup in its place. Abolishing public healthcare would certainly be a radical transformation, but I don’t think anyone could possibly argue that this would be the best solution for the British public. Today the NHS’s problems come not from having enough money, but from being forced to compete with the private sector, and from the private sector slowing taking hold of areas within the NHS. To secure the long-term future of the NHS, I believe the only solution can be a healthcare system based on strong foundations of public ownership then the NHS instead of having to worry about the private sector leeching its resources can deliver the best healthcare possible, to the widest number of people possible.
