THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE WITH SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

This article examines socialized medicine in Great Britain. Doctors and nurses are, quite properly, highly regarded. Their work in healthcare is widely seen as immeasurably valuable. The hospitals and clinics in which they work are viewed by almost everyone as crucially important local and national institutions. The mission of healthcare--curing illness, relieving pain, repairing injury, preventing disease, and saving lives--justifiably ranks close to the top of national priorities. These positive popular sentiments have been unthinkingly and uncritically invested since 1948 in the British National Health Service (NHS). A particular, concrete social organization has thus been illegitimately endowed with high public reputation. This reputation properly belongs to the healthcare professions, to great hospitals and successful clinics, and to the medical scientists who advance the knowledge on which effective healthcare relies. This displacement of positive affect from healthcare institutions, and the long-established values and skills of medicine onto the recent, historically accidental and politically contingent organizational format of the NHS, is at once confusing and damaging. It inhibits radical criticism of the NHS. It provides a cloak of ideological defense for the most reactionary elements in the NHS workforce. It inoculates the popular mind against awareness of the grave and growing deficiencies of the NHS. It blinds political leaders to the fact that healthcare in Great Britain is as effective as it is, not because of the NHS, but despite it.