I am hop­ing you can place in con­text a state­ment by Win­ston Churchill, which has been offered to show that he would sup­port cur­rent U.S. heath care reform pro­pos­als. My own Catholic parish recently pub­lished the afore­men­tioned state­ment in its weekly bulletin.

What Would Win­nie Do? Here’s an inter­est­ing quote. It’s from con­ser­v­a­tive British Prime Min­is­ter Win­ston Churchill explain­ing his view on  health care and gov­ern­ment in 1948: “The dis­cov­er­ies of heal­ing sci­ence must be the inher­i­tance of all. That is clear: Dis­ease must be attacked,  whether it occurs in the poor­est or the rich­est man or woman sim­ply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the sane way as the fire brigade will give its  full assis­tance to the hum­blest cot­tage as read­ily as to the  most impor­tant mansion….Our pol­icy is to cre­ate a national health ser­vice in order to ensure that every­body in the coun­try, irre­spec­tive of means, age, sex, or occu­pa­tion, shall have equal oppor­tu­ni­ties to ben­e­fit from the best and most up-to-date med­ical and allied ser­vices available.”

The head­ing and quo­ta­tion imply that we Catholics should sup­port national health care. Lack­ing the rhetor­i­cal con­text in which the state­ment was made and given, and knowl­edge of con­di­tions exist­ing in Britain sixty years ago, I am won­der­ing: what was Churchill’s  actual posi­tion on national health­care? —J.R., Chicago

We tend to dep­re­cate arti­cles sug­gest­ing that Churchill would do this or that about mod­ern sit­u­a­tions. His daugh­ter always likes to ask peo­ple who say such things: “How do you know?” The answer is, of course, that none of us know. (What we do know is that, except when very young, he hated that nick­name “Winnie.”)

The Churchill quo­ta­tion you sent is not from 1948, but taken from his trib­ute to the Royal Col­lege of Physi­cians on 2 March 1944. (Com­plete text avail­able from this web­site by email.)

You will have to decide whether the excerpts joined together in your church bul­letin are in con­text. (I have inserted the break.) You are right to sug­gest that con­di­tions in Britain in 1944 were dif­fer­ent (more crit­i­cal health-wise) than con­di­tions in the USA in 2009.  Also, in 1944, the words “national health ser­vice” did not nec­es­sar­ily mean what the Labour gov­ern­ment cre­ated after the war. Nor do they define what is pro­posed in Amer­ica. Pres­i­dent Obama and his sup­port­ers are not propos­ing a British National Health Ser­vice. The argu­ment is over whether what they pro­pose might lead to prob­lems sim­i­lar to the British system.

With­out ques­tion Churchill believed that new med­ical dis­cov­er­ies are “the inher­i­tance of all.” But that leaves a fairly wide array of options. On 3 July 1945, too late to affect the gen­eral elec­tion (which came two days later), he issued a Cab­i­net Paper call­ing on his col­leagues to move for­ward on leg­is­la­tion or National Insur­ance and a National Health Ser­vice. What they would have come up with we’ll never know, since the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party lost big, and the Labour Party took over and cre­ated their own plan. But con­sider that “National Insur­ance” to some peo­ple means an alter­na­tive to “National Health Ser­vice,” in which the cit­i­zen might have, for exam­ple, a med­ical sav­ings account accru­ing to the indi­vid­ual through reg­u­lar, required deposits from pay­checks, like a bank account. The mir­a­cle of com­pound inter­est is a great thing.

It seems evi­dent that Churchill did not oppose the Labour Party’s National Health Ser­vice, though he was not among its advo­cates. In the begin­ning every­thing was to be free, of course. When, inevitably, costs began to rise, and the Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer intro­duced charges for spec­ta­cles and den­tures, he protested the heavy gov­ern­ment expen­di­tures in the House of Com­mons (10 April 1951), sug­gest­ing that other economies should have been made to accom­mo­date the increases:

Those who hold that tax­a­tion is an evil must rec­og­nize that it falls upon this coun­try in a most griev­ous man­ner at the present time, con­tin­u­ally bur­den­ing the mass of the nation and con­tin­u­ally clogging—or, at any rate, ham­per­ing our efforts. There is to be an increase of tax­a­tion. I am not at all con­cerned today to exam­ine even cur­so­rily the detailed pro­pos­als which the Chan­cel­lor has made, but tax­a­tion is to be increased; it is to be heav­ier still. Nat­u­rally, many peo­ple will feel that the issue should be argued out very tensely as to whether other economies in Gov­ern­ment expen­di­ture might not have relieved us from the need of apply­ing new bur­dens and new tax­a­tion. Of course, we know the times are difficult.

…So in 1951, as we can see, Churchill was argu­ing for decreased gov­ern­ment expen­di­tures instead of higher taxes on the cit­i­zenry as the best approach to the prob­lem. In 1945, it had seemed much eas­ier of solution.

Churchill con­sid­ered socialism—a far milder form than we know today—incompatible with human lib­erty, and sought a way of ame­lio­rat­ing the com­plaints of the poor (or rel­a­tively poor) with­out con­fis­cat­ing the wealth of those who pro­duce it. To this end you may be inter­ested in read­ing the com­ments on this mat­ter by Larry Arnn in our the autumn 2009 Q&A col­umn Finest Hour 144: 11). If you are not a Churchill Cen­tre mem­ber, Arnn’s remarks are avail­able from this web­site by email.

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Related posts:

1. “Win­ston” Olber­mann and the Health­care Debate
2. Was Churchill a Closet Socialist?

Tagged as: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill Centre, Conservative Party, Finest Hour, Healthcare reform, Labour Party, Lady Soames, Larry Arnn, National Health Service (UK), President Obama, Royal College of Physicians, socialism