Word: healthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most controversial changes involve the National Health Service, the state-financed system that employs about 1 million workers and treats 30 million patients a year. Thatcher's plan, which must still be approved by Parliament, allows the best-managed of the nation's 2,000 state-run hospitals to form self-governing trusts that can hire outside staff, pay higher wages to . doctors and negotiate salaries for nursing personnel. The plan encourage doctors to shop around for the best prices on hospital services, and permits them to refer patients to hospitals outside their district...
Neil Kinnock, the Labor Party leader, pounced on the government, accusing the Tories of "putting cash before care" and "profits before patients." Labor health spokesman Robin Cook said the proposal would "put bureaucrats in the driving seat at the expense of doctors and patients," and denounced it as a "prescription for a health service run by accountants...
Those charges struck a chord among middle-and lower-income Britons, who fear a future of progressively better services for an increasingly wealthy few. The issue goes to the heart of Britain's free-health-care system and moves the country toward medical treatment based largely on the patient's ability to pay. Says Paul Swain, a London hospital consultant: "A majority of people really like the NHS no matter how much they grumble about...
While the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing opposed the plan, other health professionals reserved final judgment. Otto Chan, a junior doctor at St. Thomas's Hospital, is concerned that the emphasis on efficiency will hurt the elderly and the poor most, since they often require expensive drugs or repeated office visits. Says Chan: "The profit- making system is biased in favor of young patients...
Packard believes, not unreasonably, that the excessive concentration of wealth among a cadre of megamillionaires is worse than immoral; it is dangerous to the good health of capitalism. His proposed cures are fairly familiar -- and unlikely to be enacted: for example, taxing net worth above a certain level (say, $25 million) and reforming the rules on trusts that allow billions to escape fair taxation...