The Spectator's Notes | 19 February 2011

The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’.

The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’. Certainly most of those now dying under its care have paid taxes for it throughout their working lives, in the name of this proposition. Now we hear from the Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, that it frequently neglects old people, often to the extent of killing them. Why does this surprise anyone? It is in the nature of a service which forbids genuine choice to patients that it will end up suiting the convenience of those who work in it rather than meeting the needs of the sick. Until money truly follows the patient, each old person walking into a hospital will be seen by those working in it as an additional burden, getting in the way of treating others. More than 60 years of state medicine have almost killed off the original Christian ‘Big Society’ motives behind nursing and replaced them with trade union ones. The wider culture increasingly sees ‘assisted’ dying as positively virtuous, and the contempt that this implies for the value of an old person’s life therefore spreads through the nursing profession. The old people now being killed by the NHS are of the generation which most fervently believed in it. Their hopes are being dashed. We shall never have humane health care in this country until we understand that the creation of the NHS — though not the subsidy of health care for the poor — was a moral mistake.