LET’S have the truth about the National Health Service. It was credited to Aneurin Bevan, a cabinet minister in Clement Atlee’s Labour administration, post war.

Clement Atlee recognised the health and physical levels of the general population and the adult workforce were in very bad shape and needed lots of government help.

In order to justify the Labour Party election pledges, not only for that term of office, but for terms that he would need to be Labour controlled, he needed general health care to be cross-country provided.

And so, cabinet minister Nye Bevan was given the task or organising such provision.

There was only one conceivable way. Post war this country was low in terms of finance, except in the City of London financial environs where, even during wartime, money accumulates exponentially.

Accordingly, Bevan hotfooted it to the city’s main insuring businesses and between them and the government they set out the terms and conditions of providing such a service.

T&C, a phrase always there in financial arrangements, and always heavily weighted in favour of the moneyed lender; this was no exception; T&C’s 100 per cent favourable legally and any which way to marketers and investors; and in such fashion it came to be.

Comprehensively free at the point of need, not for long.

The pent up need for health care was such, that demand vastly outstripped supply and the money barrier was breached.

The insurers stamped on the brakes. The Labour Party lost the General Election and the Conservative Party, under Winston Churchill, introduced one shilling prescription charges for eyesight and teeth care in 1952, the thin end of the wedge.

The concept was destroyed and it has never recovered.

Although the insurance companies were virtually given millions of policy holders in one fell swoop whose contributions were gathered on their behalf by the government, they were still not satisfied.

Two-tier health care is, of course, appealing to those who could afford to pay and thus jump the queue to health professionals and use the NHS when the need was not that urgent on the back of a personal or family cover payment.

Two-tier health care is applicable today and prospects for the lower financial strata are looking increasingly dodgy to say the least.

E W REYNOLDS Weedon Road Swindon