Explain the role that different ideologies have played in the important developments in the NHS, and assess their arguments as to how the NHS should be reformed today.

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The NHS and Social Policy

Explain the role that different ideologies have played in the important developments in the NHS, and assess their arguments as to how the NHS should be reformed today.

In the history of the creation of the NHS, different ideologies have played different roles.  The two ideologies are of the social democratic approach and the market liberal approach.  The social democratic approach being that people should pay their taxes and the welfare state should provide health services for all, whereas the market liberal’s ideology was that people should pay for their own health services independently.  In this piece of writing, I will be aiming to discuss how these two different approaches have played the all fundamental role in the way that it has developed the NHS.  I will also assess the arguments, as to how the NHS should be reformed today. How does and does our current government have the all crucial key to make or break the NHS?

Social democratic ideology was that the government should have the responsibility of providing welfare provisions to the state through taxation.  This would be creating a redistribution of wealth; poor people would have access to unlimited healthcare at the point of need.  They wanted to create a more equal society through the redistribution of wealth.  They wanted people to have access to healthcare on the basis of their needs, not on their ability to pay. (Brown, K, 2003)

The New Right approach or also known as the Market Liberal approach, (which developed during the Conservative government between 1979 and 1997), this approached believed that the individual had the right and freedom to choose their welfare provisions and should have the responsibility of obtaining it through private sector.  They were against the idea of providing welfare provisions for all through taxations.  They believed that taxations should be kept to a minimum and not be wasted on providing to those who can support themselves.  The poor should only be provided with these welfare provisions and the rest of the population should be paying for their own healthcare through private medicine. (Brown, K, 2003)  

Health and Society in Twentieth Century Britain, by Jones (1994) wrote that in 1945, Aneurin Bevan, Labour Health Minister put forward proposals that all charitable and voluntary hospitals should be taken under government control.  These hospitals were to be reorganised under the hospital governing system.  The conservatives maintained that they accepted the NHS Bill, but strongly opposed Bevan’s proposal; they wanted voluntary and municipal hospitals to remain under local authority.  They did not want these hospitals to be taken into the NHS, but to remain in private ownership.  Initially, the doctors in the BMA resented the state control of the health services and salaried GP’s, but Bevan managed to win them over with his proposals.  He proposed to the doctors that they would not all be given a salaried wage, but they would be free to practice in private medicine and offered private pay beds in the NHS hospitals.  They would also be free to publicly voice their opinions about the management of the NHS.  

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It is described in Health and Society in Twentieth Century Britain, by Jones (1994), that following the years after the introduction of the NHS, the costs of it was being realised.  Assumptions were made about the country’s set amount of illness, it was thought that at first the NHS would work through the backlog of people’s illness, but in the long term, it would be more cost effective having a country that is more healthier.  In 1948, Bevan told his government that his original estimate was overly miscalculated.  In 1949, the government had to economise either by reducing services ...

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