Hear, hear!

These words don’t often roll off my tongue when I read newspaper articles. So much more pleased I am to report that this morning they did.

The Telegraph piece that elicited my enthusiastic reaction was written by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. The long title is self-explanatory: We French Love Our Health Service, But It’s Not a National Religion.

As a rule, I fill this space only with my own efforts, modest as they may be. But today I’m going to cite whole passages from Mme Moutet’s article, on the realisation that I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Also, having spent quite some time in both British and French hospitals, I can validate her comparisons of the two, unflattering though they regrettably are to Britain.

“Unlike you, we don’t and never did worship La Sécu: we see it not as one of the glories of our Scepter’d Nation, but as the kind of public service one expects from a modern country, like good trains.” I wish she hadn’t mentioned good trains, unless that was meant as a sly dig at Britain.

“The… romanticisation of your health system seems very strange. It’s as if you are afraid that… any change would destroy the mysterious compact initiated by Beveridge. The NHS seems replacement and compensation for your lost Empire. Staffed by so many Commonwealth nationals, it becomes a post-colonial iteration of goodwill…” 

I’m not sure about the post-colonial aspect of NHS veneration, but it’s clearly treated as more than just a method of providing medical care. 

However, having spent quite some in London hospitals, both private and NHS, I can testify to the preponderance of Commonwealth nationals, from the subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, the West Indies. Yet that, I suspect, is merely a matter of dire staffing necessity, rather than “a post-colonial iteration of goodwill”.

“Most hospital rooms [in France] are for one or two patients only; the notion of mixed wards is rightly seen as unacceptable.” Again I can validate this statement on the basis of personal experience.

The first time I found myself in an NHS hospital (Chelsea & Westminster, brand new at the time), I shared a room with a couple of dozen patients, half of them women. Generally speaking, I don’t mind sharing my sleeping quarters with scantily dressed females, but the circumstances were just wrong.

It’s also true that in my several stints at a provincial French hospital I never had to share a room with more than one patient, and usually not even that.

“As patients, we feel you get a raw deal… French doctors, paid less than half their British counterparts, would never countenance denying procedures for having the ‘wrong’ lifestyle.”

True on all counts. My local GP in France actually gets less than half the average salary of his NHS colleagues. And a Gorgon of a GP in London once asked me in a peremptory manner: “Why should I treat you if you smoke?”

“Because it’s your job?” I suggested. “Because you took the Hippocratic Oath?” Wrong answer, as it turned out. The buzzer went off in her head and she dumped me from her practice.

“When I felt a lump in my breast two years ago, a text got me an appointment the following day, testing within the week, and an operation three weeks later: never was I happier to be living in France rather than in the UK.”

The timings Mme Moutet cites are, give or take, standard only for private medicine in the UK. However, anyone with personal experience of the NHS would react to Mme Moutet’s description of her ordeal with a rueful smile and perhaps some words that only appear in unabridged dictionaries.

The sacralisation of the NHS is an interesting phenomenon that requires serious study. Actually the National Insurance Act was only part of the whole story. A whole raft of socialist policies were adopted at the time, including wholesale nationalisation.

But the NHS, that child of William Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan, went to the top of Mount Olympus and there it has stayed as an object of pagan worship. The impetus  might have come from the loss of religion rather than of the Empire. Cradle to grave socialist propaganda certainly was a factor as well, as it continues to be.

Bien fait, Mme Moutet, and thank you for never mentioning insufficient funding as the source of NHS ills. Somebody has to tell the truth: the NHS is bankrupt because it’s based on a bankrupt philosophy. C’est tout, as they say in France.