5 July
By Robert Gumpert
Yesterday was July 4th and with “bombs bursting in air” the US celebrated its 242nd birthday mostly by eating, drinking and setting off bombs.
Today I want to mention a different birthday – The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) turns 70. I was going to write, if that is what I do, a piece about the NHS and asked two friends in London to send me a quote. What they sent is below, and so clearly states what I would have tried to say that I have decided to leave it at that but for one related story from the US.
Neil Burgess, book seller, photographer’s agent
“My mother lost her sister to TB in 1946, the year before the NHS started. Her three children were born under the care of the NHS and I remember her telling me about how before it existed the shame of working people who had to “go on the parish”, when children were born or they were sick. That meant asking for charity from the church. The NHS freed her from that indignity and in her later life it provided brilliant treatment and excellent palliative care as she reached the end of her years. I know nothing is perfect but I wish the principle of, free equally to all at point of need, practiced by the NHS could be applied as well to our education system.”
Christine Toomey, writer and journalist
“I have heard it said that the NHS is the nearest thing we have in the UK to a national religion – it’s something that we are brought up to believe in and trust and feel passionate about, which goes some way to explaining why there is such outcry and rage when it is slowly chipped away at and increasing parts of it are privatized.”
1992: London, England: An NHS midwife works with a new mother at her home in East London. From this estate the midwife moved on to work with another new mother, this time in one of the gentrified areas of the Docklands. Later she would be in the office examining an expecting mother.
Many years ago I found myself in the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky documenting the strike in Harlan County and hanging with folks from the Black Lung Association. It was 1974, too late to see any of the once extensive health service the United Mineworkers had installed throughout the coalfields. But not too late to hear the stories of how it took care of the injured, the sick, the pregnant and the old. The union ran the program, owned the hospitals and employed the doctors. It made the union stronger, it made community stronger and healthier. Paid for by a tax on tonnage, the plan failed as coal production decreased.
Today the US still doesn’t have universal healthcare. What we have, the patchwork of state, fed and private insurance plans contracting with public and private hospitals, is under constant attack.
So really all I wanted to say on this the 70th anniversary of the NHS, is healthcare, like stable housing, makes a society stronger. It fosters community, and community – giving a damn about your fellows – is a sign of a healthy society physically and emotionally. Currently this country is having trouble with that concept and it is literally killing great numbers of us.
