What did margret thatcher do to the nhs

Ive been looking everywhere and i cannot find out what margret thatcher did to the NHS

what did she do that everyone agreed/disagreed with?
Please provide me with some information on her actions please

Thanks

Not a lot.

When Thatcher was PM the Health portfolio was combined with Social Security and for most of her time in government, the latter was more important.

She appointed a clueless, and forgotten, Secretary of State, called John Moore who was supposed to reform the NHS after the 1987 election. Apart from an admiration for the American healthcare model, he didn't have any idea how to bring about reform and managed to upset the government's natural supporters. Ken Clarke was drafted in, as he so often was, to clear up the mess.

The legacy of health policy from the 1980s is the NHS internal market by which one bit of the NHS buys services from another. This became in the 1980s standard practice in all large private and public sector organisations, not just the NHS. It was seen as radical in its time but is now no more likely to be abolished than penicillin.

She toyed with the idea of introducing a compulsory private medical insurance offset with tax relief but was headed off by some of her own ministers, notably Nigel Lawson and Ken Clarke (Clarke was health minister) who warned that it was going to be more expensive than a publicly funded system.

Instead they moved towards a model of the state being the ultimate purchaser of services, and those services being left open to the market (in some case).

Health reform has three major issues which have always stopped privatisation:

1. It is hard to make the case for privatisation on cost grounds because the evidence does not support it, especially in the US. Privatised systems based on health insurance get high levels of waste and unnecessary duplication of procedures. The arguments are usually based on the fact that for those able to afford the top end coverage, the accessibility of high quality healthcare is better, however in a system like ours the option for private health insurance exists anyway so people who can afford it can get that anyway.

2. Public opinion in the UK is strongly in favour of an NHS free at the point of delivery. It is very hard to sell people the idea of paying for healthcare and for a large proportion of the electorate it is a deal breaker because it makes people afraid of being bankrupt if their health takes a bad turn. If a party came out and put privatisation of the NHS in its manifesto it would lose a lot of voters and inspire a lot of non-voters to come out and vote for someone else standing for a free NHS.

3. The British Medical Association is a very difficult trade union to deal with, if any government ended up in dispute with it possibly it's the hardest one to deal with. You can play off most other unions in a war of attrition because the public see them as a load of scruffy lazy lefties and over time they have no sympathy anyway, but doctors have a lot of respect, and they are educated and have influence and lobbying power in high places, and also (a major issue for Tories) they are the type of well off middle class people likely to be Tory voters and have their families voting Tory. Tony Blair gave the doctors the best deal they have ever had, and I am sure the doctor class was a nice inroad for New Labour into traditional Tory heartlands.