NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care
Universal,
comprehensive health care, equally available to all and disconnected
from income and the ability to pay, was the goal of the founders of the
National Health Service. This book, by one of the NHS’s most eloquent
and passionate defenders, tells the story of how that ideal has been
progressively eroded, and how the clock is being turned back to pre-NHS
days, when health care was a commodity, fully available only to those
with money.
How this has come about — to the point where
even the shrinking core of free NHS hospital services is being handed
over to private providers at the taxpayers’ expense — is still not widely
understood, hidden behind slogans like “care in the community,”
“diversity” and “local ownership.” Allyson Pollock demystifies these
terms, and in doing so presents a clear and powerful analysis of the
transition from a comprehensive and universal service to New Labour’s
“mixed economy of health care,” in which hospitals with foundation
status, loosely supervised by an independent regulator, will be run on
largely market principles.
The NHS remains popular, Pollock argues, precisely because it created
the “freedom from fear” that its founders promised, and because its
integrated, non-commercial character meant low costs and good medical
practice. Restoring these values in today’s health service has become
an urgent necessity, and this book will be a key resource for everyone
wishing to to bring this about.
- Author
- Allyson M. Pollock, Colin Leys, David Price
- Format
- paperback
- Pages
- 319
- Publisher
- Verso
- Language
- english
- ISBN
- 9781844675395
- Genres
- medicine, medical, politics
- Release date
- 2006
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