This post was written by CHMP Senior Fellow Charmaine Ruddock, MS directs Bronx Health REACH, a coalition of 50 community and faith-based organizations, funded by the Centers for Disease Control’s REACH 2010 Initiative to address racial and ethnic health disparities.
As we struggle in the U.S. to reform our health care system many have held up the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), with its universal access to care, as something of a model. In 2011, when Bronx Health REACH hosted visitors from the UK as part of a CDC sponsored UK-US REACH learning exchange, we were struck by our visitors fervently expressed wish that the UK system not come to look anything like what they were seeing and learning of ours on their visit. They were particularly taken aback by the number of uninsured. Lo and behold their wish appears to have been thwarted with the Conservative government’s Health and Social Care Act of 2012 which supports the privatizing of much of the NHS. Here is a link to an article, Why I’m stepping down as a GP over NHS ‘reforms’: The framework for wholesale privatisation of the organisation, supply, finance and distribution of our healthcare is now in place“, written by Dr Paul Hobday, a GP (general practitioner), outlining his deep disquiet with the coming changes.
Charmaine Ruddock
