Dear Friends and fellow NHS users
What a wonderful thing it is to be alive. What an even more wonderful thing it is to know that you are alive because a team of dedicated doctors, nurses and midwives delivered you, and did everything they could to make sure that you and your mum made it through the process safely. And it is better still to know that your mum did not have to hand over money for you to be brought safely into the world. The health service meant that you were not expected to pay to exist. When you hear people badmouthing the NHS they are badmouthing the thing that delivered them. Perhaps they would be happy for their mum to have to pay for someone to make sure she did not die in childbirth. We don’t know. Perhaps they think that when you are ill, or dying, or waiting to give birth, then is the best time to have to have to worry about your finances as well.
I was born prematurely and was in an incubator as a baby. It was a publicly funded incubator and I am grateful for it. It was not a privately owned incubator that was kept running as long as my mum could pay for it. It was not a charity incubator paid for at the whim of someone else. It was paid for by everybody in this country, for anybody who might be unfortunate enough to need it. And I was put in it, and got better, and grew up and paid taxes towards other incubators. Anyone could be a premature baby, and any one of those premature babies could be saved. And they could grow up and make a contribution to the lives of those around them. And they will. And they have.
It is so hard to notice the things that have not happened to you. Thanks to the NHS I have never had polio, never will, and neither will most of the people I ever meet, but I do not walk around thinking this. Perhaps mass immunisation would have happened without the National Health Service, but would you be willing to take the risk of it not happening?
An American style system of private healthcare is based on a very false idea, that heathcare is simply something you buy for yourself, as if we all exist in isolation from each other. We don’t. You do not pay for the Health Service on the off-chance that you will need it yourself. You already have needed it, and you already have used it, a lot. We all have. You do not just pay for the Health Service to be healthy yourself, wonderful thing though that is. You pay for it to be surrounded by healthy people, to safeguard the health of the people you rely on. When you have a vaccination, you are protecting yourself and protecting everyone else around you. It is worth everyone paying for that. Please treasure your Health Service. It is an extraordinary achievement, a gift from the generation that fought and won World War II to us, as if we didn’t owe them enough already. I am grateful to it for everything it has done for me, for protecting me and everyone I know against infectious disease, for saving the lives of many people I love about when they were dangerously ill, for enabling the people I know who have long-term health problems to lead full and active lives. Its legacy is all around us, in the form of living people who would not otherwise be here. Treasure it.
