The uncritical national admiration, approaching worship, of the NHS has required the subliminal acceptance of a certain historiography: before the NHS, nothing; after it, everything. Before 1948, the poor received no treatment but were left to fend for themselves when they were sick, and more or less, to die. After 1948, the ever-solicitous state system looked tenderly after the health of the population from cradle to grave.
It wasn’t difficult to promote such historiography by using horror stories from the past, stories which were perfectly plausible because almost any conceivable system will give rise to such stories. If, per impossibile, a new system were to replace the NHS, it would not be difficult to justify it by reference to horror stories, whether or not the new system was better. A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care. Only anecdotes that also illustrate statistical trends or truths are valuable in such a context.
The statistics are not favourable to the NHS, at least if one chooses reasonable standards of comparison, namely other European countries. The results are not disastrous, but they are not good either. The NHS has failed even in its egalitarian goal: the gap between the health of the richest and poorest in society has only grown under its dispensation. And yet the belief in its levelling effect persists.
The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been so successful that it now accords with the sentiments of the population, a triumph that no communist regime achieved despite herculean efforts at indoctrination. The triumph has been achieved without compulsion or violence and ought to be an interesting case for political scientists who study the successful inculcation of political mythology. Of course, the danger of such a study would be that it might induce doubt or cynicism about other political mythologies, and we all need such mythologies to live by.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.
September 3, 2025
QotD: The distance between NHS PR and NHS reality
Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: Debunking, Propaganda, PublicHealth, SocializedMedicine, Statistics, TheodoreDalrymple — Nicholas @ 01:00
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