We find ourselves having to fight to save our National Health Service, as the government dismantles it brick by brick and gives it to the private sector.
These are dark days indeed, and days in which we need every argument we can to stop the headlong slide.
We know in the health sector that privatisation increases inequalities in neal care, our naton s teem and sight already show clearly the divide between rich and poor.
This divide will increase as privatisation reduces the available universal services, and the rich pay through private schemes for their own care, depriving the remaining hospitals and community services of specialist staff.
What is not so well rehearsed is the logic which brought these public services into being, including the National Health Service (NHS) and the rest of the apparatus of the welfare state.
The NHS as an institution didn't arrive without a struggle: and from the outset it was a compromise in the face of strong medical establishment opposition. It was one response from a Labour government with a landslide marly l a war weary cietiuralt demanding better living conditions than had existed in the depression years of the 1920s and 30s.
We know, from memories of those years, the dramatic improvement to people's health which came with the National Health Service.
People remember the immediate impact of free GP visits, free medicine, free prescribed glasses, free dentistry, and free hospital treatment and specialist care.
The health and welfare services in the 1930s and early 1940s had been a institutions and professions.
There was a Ministry of Health -best to regulate the whole arena -of the First World War, in 1919. health of the nation through sanctions, ular inspections. mum volume of service in private and voluntary hands (private midwives, doctors, hospitals, nurses and therapists) only encouraging local authorities to employ their own staff in their own institutions where this seemed to be the only way of providing services locally and then only if the charging could be used to make the services pay for themselves.
This pattern of private and public confused mixture of private and public
towards again in 2006. through which the government tried its which had been set up in the aftermath
The Ministry worked to improve the grants, government circulars, and reg- changed.
Their policy was to keep the maxiprovision looked very much like the pattern the government are moving
And the crucial point for us to note is that this system failed: it failed to improve health, and failed financially: it had to be rescued by the public purse (rather like the railways today, until it finally had to be radically
By the early years of World War 2 the private hospitals were facing bankruptcy, despite relying on insurance schemes; the nursing associations which provided the nation's midwifery were in such a state that there was strong pressure for a public national midwifery service; the local authority medical services had such a labyrinthine system of charging that money was being lost on the administration; and the nation's health record continued divided and poor.
Putting the whole system into public hands made sound financial sense; after decades of trying the keep a 'mixed' economy in health going, the government had to admit defeat.
With this history, with the Liberal Beveridge, right wing Labour PM Attlee, and left wing firebrand Aneurin Bevan all starting to move towards the idea of public ownership, it is not surprising there was an appetite for a National Health Service.
That was the modernisation which brought health care kicking and screaming into the age of scientific medicine.
How ironic that Blair's government, endlessly mouthing the mantra of modernisation is now desperately trying to turn the clock back to the chaotic days of fragmentation, private profit and health inequalities.