When Nye Bevan launched the NHS on 5 July 1948, most of the British population could not expect to celebrate a 70th birthday. Life expectancy at birth for men was 66 and for women 71. That this has since grown to 79.1 years and 82.8 years respectively is in part — though far from entirely — thanks to the NHS.
Many insist that Bevan’s description of the service as the ‘envy of the world’ remains true. For Lord Lawson, a former editor of this magazine, the NHS is ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion’ — an assertion confirmed during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, when NHS nurses jumped joyfully up and down on old-fashioned hospital beds. Moreover, public affection for the NHS seems impervious to scandals such as Mid Staffs and, as revealed last week, a fatal policy of over-prescribing opioids at Gosport Memorial Hospital.
Yet the accolades awarded to the NHS are only half-deserved.
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