EcoLogics

60 years after Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan established the UK’s National Health Service, a not-so-informal consortium of insurance companies, healthcare management consultants, private healthcare companies and New Labour politicians is doing its best to bury what was, and remains, a revolutionary proposal: as Bevan himself put it back in 1952, ‘the essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and the poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability, and wealth is not advantaged.’

By the time this post appears, reams and reams of pages will no doubt have been written about fate of the NHS six decades on from its foundation. Some will celebrate the 60th anniversary by noting all that has been achieved—and much has been achieved. Others will suggest that it is time to let the private sector take over. No better example of this neo-liberalism than today’s leader in the Telegraph, which suggests that

‘Insurance schemes that let people decide how much of their own money to spend on healthcare and top up what they contribute in taxes are the way to bring greater investment into the system. Politicians must prepare the country for the realities that need to be faced; yet the totemic power of the NHS to stifle debate seems undiminished.’(1)

In response to this typically Conservative solution, EcoLogics wishes to offer readers a quote by Bevan which not only reminds us of his acuity, but of what is fundamentally wrong with the Telegraph’s (and indeed the closet New Labour) perspective. The quote in question is taken from Bevan’s In Place of Fear: A Free National Health Service and was published in 1952:

‘All the insurance company does is to assess the degree of risk in any particular field, work out the premium required from a given number of individuals to cover it, add administrative cost and dividends, and then sell the result to the public. They are purveyors of the law of averages. They convert economic continuity, which is a by-product of communal life, into a commodity, and it is then bought and sold like any other commodity. […] What is really bought and sold is the group, for the elaborate actuarial tables worked out by the insurance company are nothing more than a description of the patterns of behaviour of that collectivity which is the subject of assessment for the time being. To this the company adds nothing but its own profits. This profit is therefore wholly gratuitous because it does not derive from the creation of anything. Group insurance is the most expensive, the least scientific, and the clumsiest way of mobilizing collective security for the individual good.’ Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear: A Free National Health Service

References

(1) ‘Happy birthday, NHS: retirement beckons‘, July 5, 2008.