YOUR correspondent EW Reynolds demands that we "have the truth about the NHS" and then goes on to perpetuate an oft-quoted myth regarding its establishment (SA, April 28).

It most certainly is true that Aneurin Bevan was Minister of Health at the time the NHS was "brought into being" in 1948.

But the foundations for the NHS were the product of the Beveridge Report of 1942 which was followed by the coalition-sponsored White Paper titled A National Health Service, published in February 1944, that proposed a comprehensive and free service.

Beveridge was intent on eliminating the five giants which he suggested inhibited the development of post-war society – want, disease, squalor, ignorance and idleness.

Sadly the truth about prescription charges is also embellished by what was not written by your correspondent. The decision to introduce prescription charges was made by Atlee’s Labour government in 1951, a decision which brought about the resignation from government of Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson. Again, it is true to say the Conservative government enacted the legislation introducing prescription charges, but we should not allow the part played by Labour politicians of the day to be overlooked. Wilson’s government of 1965 abolished charges only to relent and reintroduce them in 1968, a short-lived experiment which proved unsustainable.

EW Reynolds suggests that the NHS is no longer free at the point of need, or that it may not be for much longer. Might I suggest the NHS has never been free and has most certainly not been comprehensively free since 1952, also that being free at the point of need was only one of the three principles asserted by Bevan.

In 1959 a very perceptive radiologist made the following observations regarding the noble intentions and aspirations predicating behind the formation of the NHS. They ignored the effect of the ageing population; they ignored the nature of hospital practice in which experience had been of chronic care and general practice, not the activities of the voluntary hospitals where the application of science resulted in expansion with accelerating velocity in every branch of medicine. They were based on a misconception of health and disease whereby positive health was neither easily nor permanently achieved and the fight against disease was a continual struggle which was ever more difficult, promoting the survival of the unfit. In truth, people were cured of simpler and cheaper diseases, to fall victim later on to the more complex and expensive.

I suggest that not much has changed.

As for EW Reynolds' assertion that city financiers were to blame for the so-called demise of the new NHS and the introduction of charges, such a view is ideal for media headlines but fails to recognise the simple truth that from its early days the NHS was unable to predict the financial cost for the provision of a universal service.

Once formed, a free NHS was too difficult to reform.

DES MORGAN Caraway Drive Swindon