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NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care

About Specification

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.