Socialist Health Association conference25 years after the Black report – has anything changed?


Alex Scott-Samuel

EQUAL - Equity in Health R & D Unit Department of Public Health University of Liverpool

Health inequalities:

Unfair or unjust differences
in health determinants or outcomes within or between defined populations

Equity (in health)
…from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs…

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Distributional justice

Black’s explanations of inequality:

• artefact
• natural or social selection
• cultures and behaviours
• structural (material) inequalities

What has changed?
psychosocial epidemiology

life course epidemiology

Ineqality policy since Black:

• Thatcher – inequality is good; crumbs will trickle down
• Major – variations are of concern
• Blair I – inequality is bad
• Blair II – similar rhetoric, but de facto retreat from welfare, from equity and social cohesion

What has changed?
right
left
right

Aim of capitalism:

unequal distribution of the world’s finite material (and human) resources in order to create personal gain and private profit

capitalism can’t exist without inequality

Social democracy:
Regulated / managed capitalism: capitalism ‘as if people (in one’s own country) mattered slightly’

Now

Why are New Labour’s inequalities policies ineffective?

• upstream ‘policy based evidence making’ which disregards health equity
• mid / downstream, selectivist health policy solutions
• (unequally distributed) competing health risks
• differential diffusion of knowledge and policy uptake

Destroying Health - New Labour’s quadruple whammy

• Privatisation and commercialisation of NHS and welfare services
• Waiting, Booking and Choice
• Payment by Results
• Care Outside Hospitals

Predicted impacts of New Labour’s healthcare market

• increased inequalities
• reduced quality and efficiency
• declining levels of trust

Marianna Fotaki and Alan Boyd. From plan to market: a comparison of health and old age care policies in the UK and Sweden. Public Money and Management, August 2005, 237-243.

Chief Medical Officer’s Tips for Better Health:

• don’t smoke and don’t breathe others’ tobacco smoke
• manage stress levels
• practise safer sex – use a condom
• eat at least 5 portions of fruit & veg each day
• be physically active for at least 30 minutes, 5 days a week

Alex’s tips for the Government to promote our health:

• Values matter - what counts is not 'what works' but 'what promotes and sustains our nationally agreed values of equity and mutual welfare'. Evaluate all policy against this criterion
• Practise safer macroeconomics - avoid free markets or fiscal policies that exploit poorer nations or disadvantaged groups
• Excessive masculine gender roles damage both women and men. Make gender-equitable parenting and socialisation the top national political priority.

Alex’s tips for the Government to promote our health:

• Practise safer politics - never appoint to Cabinet posts people of either sex who display excessive masculine gender roles
• Violence is unhealthy and inequitable - don't permit arms dealing or engage in war
• Social (including health) and economic rights are as important as civil and political rights - steer clear of 'democracies' that deny social and economic rights to their citizens

Alex’s tips for the Government to promote our health:

• No-one should profit from other people's ill health - resist the attractions of private finance and keep business away from the NHS
• In the context of health care, it is inaccurate to describe anyone as a consumer, and demeaning to describe them as a customer
• Income inequality is bad for health - eliminate all NHS six-figure salaries. If you find it hard to give them up, try phasing them out gradually

Predicted impacts of New Labour’s healthcare market:

‘Privatisation, choice and competition incorporated into health and old age care policies reflect normative shifts from post-war values of solidarity and equality to autonomy and individualism….Influences from supra-national organisations and a globalised economy are likely further to strengthen these trends’

Marianna Fotaki and Alan Boyd. From plan to market: a comparison of health and old age care policies in the UK and Sweden. Public Money and Management, August 2005, 237-243.

last updated 16/09/05