At Northampton General Hospital fifty senior doctors issued a public statement which said that people who could be cured were dying, and they were dying because their hospital was being refused funds. John Pilger, Dismantling a Dream, ATV 1977
The silent suffering to which Nye Bevan referred had come back as a direct result of spending cuts by this government. ibid.
Nor is this report merely about cutbacks. It’s about a dismantling, a tearing down of whole sections of what was once Britain’s most civilising postwar achievement – your health service.
Two-thirds of all mental hospitals in Britain were built before 1891 … Here they are reduced to human litter. ibid.
The government can’t afford to put partitions between these toilets … The government spends 4% of the national health service budget on the mentally handicapped. Just 4%. And we’re cutting back. ibid.
A cover-up of the damage being done to your health service. ibid.
While the beehive of administrators and deputy administrators and assistant administrators and their public relations protectors has doubled in the last twelve years, it is the doctors and nurses and their vital support people that are being cut back. ibid.
I’ve lived in the UK most of my life, and I’ve used the National Health Service; I regard it as a treasure. I’ve had some of the best care, for not particularly serious ailments, but I’ve had some of the best care that I could possibly have ... The way the National Health Service is represented in the United States is truly scandalous – that word socialist is pulled out – it’s kind of infantile almost. Yes it’s socialist. If socialist is caring for the majority of the people and taking away the fear of being denied health care, that so many millions of Americans have, they have this fear, then yes. It is so much a part of people’s lives ... What is it about US legislators that they appear to be so in bed with such powerful interests, such as the insurance companies, that they can’t represent their own people’s needs, their own people’s basic human rights? John Pilger, interview July 2009, Democracy Now!
Obama has even rejected the Federal Healthcare Model and virtually said to the States – Well, you can organise it as you wish. John Pilger, In Conversation
‘My love for the NHS, my respect for the NHS, runs through every sinew of my body. The NHS is safe in my hands.’ John Pilger, The Dirty War on the National Health Service, David Cameron, ITV 2019
‘It happens late at night: after ten and before four. It’s called patient dumping.; ibid. investigators’ television news report
‘Patient dumping’ by hospitals is a feature of the US healthcare system. It has arrived in Britain. ibid. caption
‘The NHS has been re-purposed from a public service to something for profit extraction.’ ibid. Dr Bob Gill
The biggest open secret in Britain is that the National Health Service, the NHS, is under attack. This war on a unique institution is not new, but has entered a dangerous new stage. In 2019 more of the NHS was sold to private firms than ever before. ibid. Pilger
This film is a tribute to an institution that gave freedom from fear to millions. The first of its kind in the world. The last bastion of true public service. It’s also a film about democracy. ibid.
In 2018 the NHS in England spent more than £92 million on private ambulances and taxis for patients. ibid.
Thousands of NHS operations are outsourced to private hospitals. ibid.
The National Health Service was not a gift from above. It was conceived in the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people who had built the imperial might and wealth of Britain and yet often lived in abject poverty. ibid.
Britain’s deadly disease was class. ibid.
On July 5th 1948 the most momentous social change of all was announced by this leaflet delivered to every household: Your NEW Health Service! ibid.
But it was the new Labour government of Tony Blair that accelerated the sell-off. Blair used an accountancy trick called Private Finance Initiative or PFI. New hospitals were effectively owned by the companies that built them under disastrous pay-later terms. ibid.
The government wants to replace thousands of GPs with consultations by video and app and robot. ibid.
As many as 87,000,000 Americans cannot afford health insurance or their insurance is made virtually worthless by excess changes known as deductibles. ibid.
Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans: Wendell Potter. ibid.
There is no need for austerity. There is a debt owed by banks that were bailed out with our money. We the people don’t owe a penny. And why are we paying for it? Why are the poorest picking up the bill when some of the biggest companies in the world pay little or no tax. Why has mass poverty returned to Britain? ibid.
In 2014 NHS spending on management consultants reached £640 million a year. ibid. caption
Management consultants … are making it worse. ibid. Bristol University 2018 study
Jack Matthews: killed by social class. He was an unskilled labourer. A member of the lowest social class. Now Mr Matthews has died of lung cancer aged only fifty-four. His risk of early death was twice as great as someone from the middle classes. What’s more he lived in Newcastle. And the north has worse health than the south. The younger you are, the most effectively class kills. Horizon: Death of the Working Classes 1988
There are five classes: Professional, Managerial, Skilled, Partly Skilled, Unskilled ... The results are shocking. ibid.
The gap has got wider. ibid.
Perhaps the value of the Longitudinal Study [1971-1975] has been to confirm the reality of the health gap between classes. ibid.
The Health Divide: Inequalities in Health in 1980s. ibid. Margaret Whitehead, Health Educational Council report, March 1987
Black [Report] called for the end to Child Poverty. ibid.
A right to good health: at present that right doesn’t exist. ibid.
On the morning of May 12th NHS staff were about to be confronted by a major outbreak as an epidemic swept like wildfire across the country. But the disease didn’t affect patients and it wasn’t biological, instead it attacked the central nervous system of the NHS itself. Across the country computer systems were knocked out by a highly contagious computer virus. Horizon: Cyber Attack: The Day the NHS Stopped, BBC 2017
Something remarkable is happening in the heart of two of our biggest cities. One of the most advanced and expensive cancer treatments in the world is being installed in Manchester and London. This is no ordinary medical cure. It will involve two nine-ton machines firing beams of radiation at two-thirds the speed of light. It will cost more than a quarter of billion pounds, but it will save thousands of lives. Until now, patients in need of this pioneering treatment have had to travel abroad … Proton Beam Therapy. Horizon: The 250 Million Pound Cancer Cure, BBC 2019
A crucial piece of technology that will sit within it – the Cyclotron. ibid.
300 tons of magnets to focus the protons into a narrow beam. ibid.
National compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave. Winston Churchill radio broadcast 1943
There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. ibid.
The National Health Service is the envy of the world. Enoch Powell
The National Health Service is safe in our hands. Margaret Thatcher
The proposals represent the most far-reaching reform of the National Health Service in its forty-year history. They offer new opportunities and pose new challenges for everyone concerned with the running of the service. Margaret Thatcher
If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people. Tony Benn MP
Now Attlee’s vision of Jerusalem was about to become real. Aneurin Bevan, architect of the National Health Service, set out to create a centralised British system free to all. But it wouldn’t be built without a fight ... The doctors organised an offensive against the government ... As he [Bevan] said later, ‘I stuffed their mouths with gold’. On July 5th 1948 here at the Park Hospital in Manchester, Bevan proudly unveiled the National Health Service ... The National Health System changed the country ... If there was one thing the British people took from the war experience it was a health service free at the point of use. And no government of any stripe has dared take it away from us since. New Jerusalem – this is what it looked like. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. Professor Stephen Hawking
cf.
Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the US where the NHS would say his life is essentially worthless. Investor’s Business Daily, US magazine
But the extravagant claims made for the results of all this free contracting do not bear close scrutiny. Britain has grown less rapidly and the gains from the lower growth are bitterly unequally distributed. The scope for the abuse of British democracy, ever present in a country without a written constitution, has become more evident as the transformation of the public sector into a web of contract relationships has been prosecuted with little regard for accountability. A new value system has grown up in which everything has a price and is potentially up for sale. Will Hutton, The State to Come
Tonight: a health service on the brink of financial disaster. And the tough choices that lie ahead. Tonight: What Next for the NHS? ITV 2014