NHS, plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care - Hardcover

Pollock, Allyson M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844670112 ISBN 13: 9781844670116

Publisher: Verso, 2004

Synopsis

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 NHSs 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’ expenseis 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.

About this title

About the Author

Allyson Pollock is Professor of Health Policy and Health Services Research at University College London. A public health doctor, she researches and publishes widely on health policy issues and is a frequent contributor to radio and television discussions.

Colin Leys is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. His previous books include Politics in Britain, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory and, with Leo Panitch, The End of Parliamentary Socialism.

Review

“It should be required reading for everyone who works in the biggest industry in the country and everyone that uses it. You will learn things about the NHS that you never knew and ought to.”—Claire Rayner

“Pollock offers a critical contribution to the key issues in contemporary political and policy debate: the role of choice, competition and private provision in health system reform.”—James Johnson, British Medical Association

“Allyson Pollock;s criticism of those who have promoted health care as a commodity, to be sold for private profit, is based partly on the moral importance of social solidarity and shared risk in providing for health care. But it is also based on economic analyses that lay bare the gross inefficiencies of markets in health and social care. If ‘what matters is what works’, this book makes clear that health care markets can not serve the British people well.”—Sir Iain Chalmers, Editor, James Lind Library

“This is a shocking story, brilliantly told, by one of the leading thinkers in the field of public health policy. Here you will learn how the NHS, for decades vandalised by the Tories, is now being destroyed by Labour policies and politicians who, with their cronies from the private sector, are turning this magnificent institution into on the greatest pork barrels of all time.”—Raymond Tallis, author of Hippocratic Oaths, Medicine and its Discontents

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1844670112
• ISBN 13: 9781844670116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272