I grew up in a dirt poor family, one of those families adopted by the British Legion, who came round each Christmas and dropped off second hand presents and a hamper of food and took us to the pantomime each year. Without their help, Christmas would have been a very different time and although it always shamed my Mother, they made Christmas for four kids who didn’t understand what poverty meant.
It was normal for me to have cardboard in my shoes when I went to school, walking on the sides of my shoes when it was raining on the way to school, though the cardboard never lasted the day.
Tuesday’s evening meal was always Marrow bone soup, something I looked forward to, a great cauldron of soup bubbling away with a great big bone from the butchers. It was many years before I realised that when my mother told us she had eaten earlier when she sat at the table for our meal, she was going hungry.
Having been born in 1951, a post war child, I grew up in the early years of the NHS, not knowing that just a few scant years earlier there would have been no regular check ups with the dentist. I did not know that when I regularly woke screaming in the night with mysterious, agonising, pains in my stomach, the Doctors call was free and my Mother was spared the worry of what to do because she would never have been able to afford to pay for such visits. When I was diagnosed with acute Appendicitis, the operation was assured, paid for by the people of Britain in Great Ormond Street Hospital.
I was just one of the recipients of Nye Bevans dream made reality, against incredible opposition, of a health care system free at the point of use.
Much has changed, dentists, opticians and prescriptions have already been lost to charges, but the corner stones remained, GP’s and hospitals free at the point of use. Yet on the 22nd of May at the British Medical Association’s annual local medical committee conference in York there will be a vote on whether to charge between £10 and £25 for GP appointments. If these charges are voted for it will be the end of Bevans greatest achievement of health care for all, many people, already struggling to make ends meet, will no longer have free at the point of use access to a GP. The poorest will suffer, health will deteriorate, and the nation will have taken a great leap backwards.
The lives of ordinary people could be about to unknowingly change dramatically with barely a murmur from the mainstream media. The NHS as we once knew it is being privatised and taken away from us. If ever there was a time to stand up and fight for our health and our HHS, that time is right now.
At the very least a letter to the BMA could make all the difference:
BMA House, Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9JP
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/07/gps-vote-charging-patients-appointments
