Establishing a culture of entitlement - Health Care

England has had their National Health Service for a little over 60 years now. An interesting look at how this entitlement has changed the culture and health of the English. From the London Daily Mail:

The death of resilience: A Britain that prided itself on self-reliance now believes pills can cure anything and happiness is a human right
The brass band from Yorkshire Main Colliery assembled outside the doctor�s surgery in Edlington, South Yorkshire, and began to play. From the window above fluttered a Union Jack; below, the doctor handed out drinks to the puffing bandsmen.

It was July 5, 1948, the first day of a new era: the age of the National Health Service.

But few of those people toasting the new arrival, born and bred in a country that valued stoicism, reticence and self-reliance, could have imagined how deeply their successors would sink into hypochondria and self-indulgence.

To the first NHS patients, the latest Department of Health figures � which show that the average Briton picks up a staggering 16 prescriptions a year and the Government spends an astonishing �22 million a day on prescription drugs � would seem utterly inconceivable.

For unlike their successors, those people who queued outside doctors� surgeries in July 1948 were not whingers or hypochondriacs.

And what they would make of another report yesterday � that in an era of cuts and sacrifices, the Government�s �happiness czar� Lord Layard is offering �80,000 a year for someone to run the new �Movement for Happiness� � simply defies imagination.

They were the last in a long line of ordinary Britons who did their best to live up to the ideal of the stiff upper lip and saw life�s disappointments as troubles to be endured rather than as an excuse to demand yet more help from the state.

As the war had just shown, the average Briton had a strong sense of duty, believing in an obligation to give something to the state rather than the other way round.

�What we want from the British people is self-discipline and self-restraint,� said the founder of the NHS, the socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan.

Sixty years on, those virtues seem to have evaporated. Of course, today we are a much healthier people living longer � though whether we are happier is a moot point.

Bevan is quite the character -- he had a very hard time brokering the deal for National Health Care. There was a lot of opposition to this from the Hospitals and the Doctors. From the WikiPedia entry: Bevan later gave the famous quote that, in order to broker the deal, he had "stuffed their mouths with gold". From his book - In Place of Fear: The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand, if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society. It is not about health, it was never about health. It is about power and control.