"I stuffed their mouths with gold," said Aneurin Bevan, speaking of the only way he had been able to get the consultants into the NHS when it started.

When gold won't buy quiet

Extract:

""I stuffed their mouths with gold," said Aneurin Bevan, recalling the only way in which he had been able to silence the shrill protests of the consultants who might otherwise have strangled the NHS at birth. After a weekend in which doctors took to the street in protest, ministers may take comfort from knowing that for the government to encounter resentment from medics is nothing new. But ministers may now face a deeper difficulty too, in the attitudes of taxpayers. Helped along by a Conservative party showing a new adeptness in presentation, the idea gaining ground is that the government has once again been dishing out the gold to the doctors, but that this time round it has not been having the effect it should."

Well the doctors are still grossly overpaid and are still for all practical purposes unaccountable to the patients whom nominally they serve, because the NHS complaints procedures are in practice an exercise in futility and exhaustion for complainants. Despite all the 'gold' lavished on the doctors, we have an extremely poor health service. - Added to poor service, our once-clean hospitals are now dirty, and many patients fear to go into them in case they catch one of the hospital acquired infections...