I have heard the whoops and hollers as the many who are blinded by their inability to provide adequately in their life now have a chance to shine. Our new, shiny, nationalized healthcare plan as it is referred to, is nothing more than socialized healthcare in an American package. Everyone who I find cheering this travesty on are the broken ones who struggle day by day to figure out where they fit in our society. They now have a place, socialization of America means the end of the caste system that so brutally puts them at the bottom of the lists. Now we are all equally poor. Why work so hard struggling for all that you want or need-now the government will provide it. Eventually they will see that all they worked for was a bailout of our labor organizations, opening our lives to government intervention and the eventual demise of democracy as we have known it. The caste system is still in place, we have just added a few levels to it’s numbers. Below I have I posted some real information which explains exactly what we have accomplished with the passing of this bill….enjoy the kool-aid America.
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.
—Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, p106
The United Kingdom, as a welfare state, was prefigured in the William Beveridge Report in 1942, which identified five “Giant Evils” in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease.
Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government pledged to eradicate these Evils. The government undertook measures in policy to provide for the people of the United Kingdom “from the cradle to the grave.”
This policy resulted in massive expenditure and a great widening of what was considered to be the state’s responsibility. In addition to the central services of Education, Health, Unemployment and sickness allowances and so on, the welfare state included the idea of increasing redistributive taxation, increasing regulation of industry food and housing (better safety regulations, “weights and measures” controls etc.)
The Welfare State was a commitment to health (in 1948 the National Health Service was created), education, employment and social security.
However the initial foundation of the National Health Service did not involve building new hospitals but merely the nationalisation of existing municipal and charitable foundations. The aim was not to substantially increase provision but to standardise care across the country; indeed Beveridge believed that the overall cost of medical care would decrease, as people became more healthy and so needed less treatment. Instead the cost increased dramatically, leading to severe financial problems, and charges (for dentures, spectacles and prescriptions) were introduced in 1951 – by the same Labour government that had founded the NHS just three years earlier. Despite this, the principle of health care “free at the point of use” became a central part of the idea of the welfare state, which later governments critical of the welfare state were unable to reverse. The classic Welfare State period lasted from approximately 1945 to the 1970s, when policies under Thatcherism began to privatise public institutions, although many features of it remain today. This includes, but is not limited to, compulsory National Insurance contributions, and the provision of old age pensions.
