It was all worked out so that sick people in Britain could be looked after and seek treatment undeterred by the financial disaster it previously entailed. So they were told — but it didn’t work out that way. In capitalist society you get nothing for nothing and the politicians (outright callous Tory or two-faced hypocritical Labour) make no bones about their ‘need’ to modify workers’ wages for (and limit the benefits of) a health scheme which fails to satisfy the “cheap healthy work force” expedient of those who planned it.
For let there be no mistake about the motive of those who devised the idea of a National Health Service, telling the world it was to ensure unfettered medical attention for all who needed it. It was (as many publications inadvertently disclose) to cut the cost to British capitalism in working hours lost to their businesses through workers’ sickness.
Now, these Capitalist interests are not happy with their own deal. They feel that British doctors are not doing their bit in the cheap maintenance of healthy wage slaves, but are spending too much capitalist money in the process by “overprescribing” for the sick who turn to them for help. A “free” health scheme (in fact it costs 20p per item on each prescription and there’s a lot of Parliamentary agitation to make it more) is all very well in the interests of the country’s employers — but if general practitioners take the thing too far they will have to be pulled into line. Thus Mr. Mike Thomas, Labour MP for Newcastle, has introduced a Bill demanding that registered medical practitioners be limited in the drugs they may prescribe to a small list and that their surgery treatment notes be made available to a panel who may have to “discuss” with them the treatment they arc making available to patients on the “National Health”.
Quote, from the doctors’ periodical Pulse 10.7.76: —
‘‘The Government may be forced into taking more radical action to reduce the level of prescribing, both within general practice and the hospital service in order to peg the rising drugs bill. Minister of State for Health, Dr. David Owen has called for ‘better prescribing overall’ and has reminded the profession, yet again, that it is now having to make economic decisions within the context of tightly reined resources. Unfortunately both Dr. Owen and Social Services Minister, Mr. David Ennals have reached that stage where they are issuing repeated warnings on the need for constraint in each sector of the Health Service, but no one knows precisely how the Government intends to cut back costs or what level of toughness it is prepared to use. The Department of Health circular issued last week, for example, was supposed to represent ‘Guidelines’ on the much-vaunted review of NHS management costs . . . Dodging the perfectly justifiable suggestions from one Tory questioner that there was need for a realistic uprating of prescription charges which still remain at their pre-inflation rate, Dr. Owen replied: “What is needed is better prescribing overall and a recognition by patients that not every ailment is cured by pills . . . The medical profession must recognize that it has to make economic decisions. At present the prescription Bill has no cash limit and is open-ended . . . But if the medical profession is not able to show some form of economic restraint in its budget, any Government would be forced to look at other measures ... At the moment we prefer to rely on education and we hope to keep the drugs bill within reasonable bounds by that method.’ ”
The article in Pulse continues:
The drugs bill to which Dr. Owen was referring amounted to £379 million during the last financial year in England. At £7.00 a year per person, was that not good value for money? Dr. Owen took this opportunity, replying to Labour back-bencher Dr. Maurice Miller, to confirm that the pharmaceutical industry was not guilty of drawing any excess profits — and that any blame for the escalating drugs bill lay with an over-demanding public and over-generous profession.
In other words, Dr. Owen has the gall to represent himself as unaware of how notorious drug firms are for their enormous profits, and upset by patient’s demands for adequate treatment and doctor’s desires to provide it!
Health at a Price
Quoting from the doctors’ periodical General Practitioner, 16.7.76, on page 8 we read:
A blunt warning that the National Health Service must ‘live within its means’ was given by the Prime Minister last week. Only 24 hours after the Cabinet began a series of meetings to prepare for public spending cuts totalling about £1,000 million next year, Mr. Callaghan made it clear that the NHS would not escape the treasury act. He told members of the Royal College of Surgeons at a dinner in London that ‘difficult choices and unwelcome decisions’ lay ahead in many areas of public expenditure. Doctors would be faced in their everyday work with a difficult period of adjustment from a fairly rapid rise in the amount of resources available in recent years to more stringent conditions.
This, of course, is a typical politician’s mealy-mouthed way of avoiding saying that National Health Service patients will have to suffer neglect by being denied benefits once promised by the British capitalist class. But to add insult to injury, listen to the sheer two-faced double-talk the Labour Leader follows it up with. Quote: “At a time when the ordinary wage earner is voluntarily cutting his own standards, the health service too must live within its means.”
In other words, Mr. Callaghan feels that if workers are being deprived in one way it is only fair that they also be deprived in another! This is the depth to which opportunist politicians will sink and a measure of the contempt they have for their wage slaves’ discernment.
This is but one of the many degrading aspects of life under capitalism, where men can dictate how much medical attention and care their fellows are “entitled to.” In a Socialist society such inhuman parsimony would be impossible. There would be no leaders able to hoodwink anyone, and not just health care but all goods and services would be free to every one.
R. B. Gill
That's the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
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