Socialized Medicine: The British View

[poliphilo]

We Brits love our NHS.

Many of us (including Professor Stephen Hawking) think we owe our lives to it.

Universal healthcare, free at the point of delivery- brilliant, eh?  No worries about keeping up with the payments, no women in labour being turned away from hospitals because they don't have the insurance, no-one suffering or dying because they can't afford the drugs.

Sure we have our complaints:  the NHS has been mismanaged, over-managed, underfunded- there are constant scandals and controversies- but no politician would dare suggest dismantling it- not even those on the far, far right.  The battle for socialized medicine was won in the 1940s- and now there's no British institution- not the monarchy, not the BBC, not the "mother of  parliaments"- that's more highly regarded or more firmly bedded in.

We understand you Americans are being offered a system of socialized medicine similar to ours and that some of you, instead of dancing around in your pyjamas and firing off skyrockets, are actually campaigning noisily against it. This surprises us. It fact it bewilders us.  If we didn't regard you Americans as cousins we'd be going "Foreigners, eh?" and doing that thing where you hold your forefinger level with your temple and twirl it round and round.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

As one of the people who opposes the Obama plan, I hope you aren't calling me ignorant. Reasonable people can disagree on issues. EDIT: And I don't think there's a group that refuses to believe Obama won the election. There is a group of crazies who believes that Obama was born outside the U.S. and thus ineligible, but craziness isn't the province of only one political party -- about the same number of people on the other side believed that George W. Bush had advanced notice of the September 11, 2001 attacks and suppressed it for... well, they were never completely clear on that.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Laura, I am certainly not calling you ignorant. I referred specifically to a group that is deliberately trying to inflame and frighten ignorant people.

I know, of course, that thinking people will not always agree with my own opinions.