What kind of health care system does the UK have and how does it relate to the economic theory introduced in Units 2 and 3? Most health care in the UK is delivered by the National Health Service (NHS). So what is the NHS and how does it work?
The National Health Service - some history
Aneurin Bevan, who as Secretary of State for Health was responsible for setting up the new service in 1948. |
The National Health Service was set up by the Attlee Labour government in 1948 following ideas initially set out in the 1942 Beveridge Report.
The then Secretary of State for Health, Aneurin Bevan was determined that everybody would have access to the health care they needed regardless of income. He believed that the best way to achieve this was to create a centralised, unitary system. This would have meant that all health care services would have been organised within a single, national service and that structure would have been controlled from the centre. However, opposition from the medical profession forced him to compromise and the structure of the service which emerged in 1948 reflected this.
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The NHS - A command approach to health care?
In many respects the National Health Service represents a command solution to the problem of allocating health care.
On the production side, the state decides how much health care is to be produced and who is going to get it. The state is also directly involved with the production of health care. Most medical facilities such as hospitals are owned by the state and the people working in the NHS are employed by the state, either directly or as independent contractors.
Health care in the UK is almost totally financed out of taxation. 98% of the finance comes from general tax revenues. This means that people have no direct choice about whether they pay for health care or how much they pay. However, the other side of this is that all health care apart from charges for items such as prescriptions, eye checks and dentistry is free and available to all UK citizens who need it.
In the rest of this unit we look at how the NHS is organised and how well it works before looking in detail at the recent reforms of the service.
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