I.istening to some people arguing about the National Health Service
Act I found myself wondering why nothing is ever done for the healthy. Even in a hypochondriacal community like ours, there is a proportion of the population who, whether by luck or good management, never go sick. Once they have got over their nursery ailments, and unless they sustain some physical injury, they go on, for decade after decade, enjoying rude heakh. In however small a way, they must be a boon to the community. They do not give other people their diseases, for they have :lone to give ; they do not occupy beds in hospitals, they put no strain whatever on doctors, surgeons, specialists, nurses or medical equipment and supplies, they work (or anyhow are fit to work) 365 days in the year. They earn, in an important test, full marks ; yet nobody even gives them five for neatness. They contribute financially as much as any- body else to a health service from which they derive only indirect (or preventive) as opposed to direct (or curative) benefits ; and they spend a good deal of their working lives being used, like a Brigade of Foot Guards, to plug a gap in the line. Since the object of the whole exercise is to produce a healthy community, I should have thought there was something to be said for rewarding the healthy individual by allowing him a rebate on his National Health Insurance contributions over a given period. But this, of course, might be held to introduce the beastly profit-motive, an anomaly to which no increase in the number of people who took some trouble about keeping healthy would reconcile the doctrinaires.
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