ABSTRACT
In 1997, the Lancet carried a leader entitled ‘Health inequality: the UK’s biggest issue’ (Editorial, 1997). It quoted from the original 1942 Beveridge Report (which was the blueprint for the National Health Service): ‘a health service providing full preventive and curative treatment of every kind to every citizen without exceptions, without remuneration limit and without an economic barrier at any point to delay recourse to it, is the ideal plan’. This was a fine ideal but probably never realistic: because Beveridge did not foresee the huge and expensive advances in treatment, nor the effect of people living far longer as health care improved. More than 60 years later, today’s UK Government is dedicated to abolishing so-called ‘postcode prescribing’, (where people in one area of the UK can obtain certain drugs or treatments but those in another area cannot). Sadly, there is a clear link between social deprivation and health and life expectancy.
