No, nothing to do with Max Boyce...
More to do with the inevitable diminution in the numbers of the people who bore witness to the rebuilding of the UK immediately after WWII. [Those with much the same claim to the Boer War or WWI will have already met with their fate, for the most part.]
"While it is refreshing to read William Beveridge quoted as an authority (We won't need a PC World NHS if more go private, 30 July), Melissa Kite falls into the common trap of reading documents without understanding the context.
As a young soldier during the war I remember listening to Beveridge speaking about his recent report. While he was sincere, I feel that those who commissioned his report were not, because the war had barely ended when Winston Churchill said the country couldn't afford it.
Fortunately, that apparently boring man Clement Attlee became prime minister and it was his government that were the true founders of the NHS. It was the late 1940s, and within a year or two of the end of a devastating and costly war. Despite what Kite writes, it was to be a truly National Health Service for all, not a "basic service which others could build on". She won't know about the long arguments as to whether private provision had any place within the incipient NHS.
The founders of the NHS knew that private healthcare would draw resources away from the service and enable those with money to jump the queue ahead of those in greater need. That is what those founders really intended should not happen.
And in those days there were very few who could afford "to set aside their hard-earned money to make provision for themselves". Instead, all those at work would pay into national insurance, which we still have!
Frederick Beddow
Shrewsbury, Shropshire"
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jul/31/nhs-implications-of-going-privateIgnorance is bliss, bliss is happiness, I am happy...to draw your attention to the possible connectivity in the foregoing.
