Uneasy Marriage

Britain's National Health Service, begun in July 1948, was supposed to do what a vast majority of the British medical profession wanted done: provide medical care for the nation as a whole.* The doctors differed with the government on many aspects (e.g., the voluminous paper work and bureaucratic controls), but by & large they tried to make a go of it. Last week the British Medical Association declared bluntly that the overall plan wasn't working. Said the lead editorial in the Association's British Medical Journal: the N.H.S. is headed for bankruptcy.

"We are, as a profession, facing the bankruptcy of a policy, a policy based on the decisions of the coalition government during a war for survival and put into execution by a Minister of Health [Aneurin Bevan] who could not resist the temptation to behave like a Fairy Godmother to an impoverished nation . . .

". . . The uneasy marriage between the medical profession and the state is now undergoing the strains of an unbalanced domestic economy. The N.H.S., if it is not to fail completely in its aims, will, we are convinced, have to undergo successive modifications . . . The public has run riot in the chemist's shop--at what a cost it is only just beginning to discover. The shocking waste of public money over the inessentials of medicine has left little over for what is more urgently needed . . .

"It is difficult to see how the N.H.S. can be put on a sound footing and the full resources of modern medicine be at the disposal of the public without considerable readjustment of its economy. The medical profession is discontented and disillusioned not because of payment, or lack of it, for this or that, but because it sees postponed indefinitely the opportunities for improving the medical care of the people."

The B.M.A. was unhappy because the government did not get enough health centers operating, with doctors practicing in groups, and it also wanted more pay and more hospital privileges for general practitioners. It urged a nominal charge (as little as 70-c- a week) for board & lodging in hospitals, and a token fee of 28-c- towards the cost of each X-ray film and each pair of spectacles.

* In line with the 1942 recommendations of the famed Beveridge Report, which urged all-around social security for Britons from the cradle to the grave.

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