【Supplementary Reading】

The following is an excerpt from a speech titled“More matrons to help the long⁃term ill”given by the Health Secretary of the United Kingdom John Reid on June 8，2004.He is advocating the need to train more community nurses for long term patients.In the following excerpt，he outlines the reasons why he opposes the use of voucher card for treatment.This clearly expresses the Labor point of view.

First I want to outline our arguments about a direction we will not be going in.It has been suggested that we should provide each person who suffers such conditions with a voucher that would represent the cost of some aspect of their NHS treatment and that patients would be encouraged to supplement this voucher with their own money or money from private medical insurance.This is similar to the Conservative policy on Patients Passports that they are apparently still working out.

We are against this policy for three reasons.

First，we strongly believe that everyone should have equal access to health care regardless of their ability to pay.This was a founding principle of the NHS—is something that the vast majority of people expect us to maintain as a principle because it appeals to the basic fairness of the British people.If you provide a basic NHS voucher that allows those people with money to top it up，then it is inevitable that those people without money will not have the same access as those with it.

Second，we believe that those with their own money will be able to jump the queue in front of those without those resources.Access to speedy care is one of the advances we are making in the NHS.If we use NHS money to subsidize those people who have their own resources to jump the queue those who pay their taxes will be providing a subsidy to enable those with their own money to jump the queue in front of them.

Third，when you are diagnosed as having a long⁃term condition from that moment on it will become either impossible or very much more expensive for you to gain private medical insurance.This would mean that the only way those individuals could supplement their NHS voucher would be through their own money.At one stroke this would split those poorer people with long⁃term conditions from the rest of their fellow patients.

So a part of any big Conversation is making it clear where we will not go.We believe it is a cruel deception to introduce the amount of money a person has or does not have into the quality of the NHS services they get.Such a deception masquerades as choice，but is in fact ONLY choice for those who can afford to make that choice.Poorer people with long term conditions should not be made even worse off by being forced to the back of the queue in the NHS.