If only the American economy had grown at the rate as what the New England Journal calls the “tattoo industry”! The world would be in much better economic shape, for according to the Journal the proportion of American adults who have at least one tattoo has risen from 14 percent in 2008 (already much increased from days gone by) to 21 percent today. Fifty percent growth in 4 years! Not even China could match it.
 
Nor is this a merely American trend: a friend of mine, a professor of pharmacology, recently visited a university town in Sweden to give a lecture and was surprised to find that practically all the young people there were tattooed. The small town in France near where I live now has at least two tattoo parlours; I was recently in Gloucester, England, where I counted eleven; and a New Zealand doctor-friend of mine, who specializes in treating adolescents, tells me that half of young New Zealanders now have tattoos. The wife of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has a tattoo on her ankle.

The NHS was founded on the principle that health care should be allocated according to need and not according to ability to pay, so that treatment, paid for by general taxation, should be free at the point of service. In this way, the health of the poor would come closer to equaling that of the rich.

But the point is that one of the claimed vindications of the system is that it is egalitarian in effect. Clearly, it is not. What is striking in Britain is the persistence of the idea that the NHS is egalitarian, even while journalistic and governmental laments at the widening health gap between the rich and the poor grow ever louder.

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