The Hidden History of American Healthcare by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann [Hartmann, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Beveridge Report: The British Plan for Defense and Welfare

The Beveridge Report, while not well known in the United States, is as familiar to every British schoolchild as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is to Americans. Beveridge saw himself as a revolutionary in the mold of FDR—taking bold steps to solve big problems, paramount among them the widespread lack of access to healthcare.

“A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” he wrote about his report.21

At the time, the UK’s health and insurance system resembled today’s in the United States. There was means-tested help for poor people, along with competing insurance companies and competing hospital systems, while doctors and pharmaceutical companies pretty much charged whatever they could get away with.

Beveridge pointed out that Britain’s social welfare system, including supports for healthcare, was a “complex of disconnected administrative organs, proceeding on different principles, doing invaluable service but at a cost in money and trouble and anomalous treatment of identical problems for which there is no justification.”22

Beveridge wrote that there were then “five giants on the road” blocking progress toward a more just society, including “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness.”23

When the report was submitted to Parliament, a huge debate broke out, with conservatives like Brendan Bracken suggesting that it should be suppressed and never officially published.

Sir Kingsley Wood, the chancellor of the exchequer, complained that following Beveridge’s recommendations would hit Britain—even after the war—with “an impracticable financial commitment.”

Nonetheless, with Churchill’s emphatic support, the cabinet voted on November 26 to publish the Report on December 2, 1942.

Beveridge’s report hit Britain like a thunderclap. As recounted in Welfare States and Societies in the Making, “The MOI Home Intelligence reported that the plan had been ‘welcomed with almost universal approval by people of all shades of opinion and by all sections of the community,’ and that it was seen as the first step towards postwar reconstruction and as ‘the first real attempt to put into practice the talk about the new world.’ . . . A British Institute of Public Opinion Report based on a sample taken in the fortnight after publication of the White Paper found that 95 per cent of the public had heard about it; that there was ‘great interest in it,’ most markedly ‘among poorer people.’ The greatest criticism, the BIPO found, was that the proposed old-age pensions were not high enough. ‘There was overwhelming agreement that the plan should be put into effect.’”24 Amazingly, Churchill’s own conservative Tories were among the most anxious to fascism-proof Britain with a strong social welfare system, including a national health service. “The Tory Reform Committee, consisting of 45 Conservative MPs, demanded the founding of a Ministry of Social Security immediately.”25

The next spring, the war was still going on, worse than ever in some respects. Nonetheless, Churchill and Parliament continued hard at work on implementing Beveridge’s vision for a national healthcare system. He gave a speech broadcast live by the BBC on March 21, 1943, which he titled “After the

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