
Originally Posted by
jon1959
No it wasn't.
The reasoning behind the formation of the NHS - and to slay the "five giants" identified by Beveridge (want, disease, squalor, ignorance, idleness) - was based on idealism and disgust at the way the private health system worked. It wasn't the result of cynicism and chasing a more efficient way of exploiting labour.
There was also an opportunity that wasn't there before the Second World War:
- The emergence of a view that health care was a right, not something bestowed erratically by charity
- Bipartisan agreement that the existing services were in a mess and had to be sorted out
- Financial difficulties for the voluntary hospitals
- The Second World War that ensured the creation of an emergency medical service as part of the war effort
- The cataclysmic effects of the war that made it possible to have a massive change of system, rather than incremental modification
- An increasing view among the younger members of the medical profession that there was a better way of doing things
And a small contribution by A J Cronin through his very influential novel The Citadel - about a doctor in a small Welsh mining village - that exposed the evils of private health care to those who had never experienced it in poverty.