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

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Count me in as another who doesn't get the opposition in the US. Our healthcare system is terrible, riven as it is by parish-pump politics, unionisation and vested interests (and everyone blames the minister who, they forget, actually volunteered for the job!) but still, Jonathan's mother owes her life to their care.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose any national healthcare system is perfect, but I'm very glad I live with the British and not the American set-up.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

That seems to me a simple choice, with the UK system winning every time.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It surprises me that opponents of the Obama plan are holding up the British NHS as an example of How Not To Do It. This seems to me to disregard all the evidence. The NHS isn't perfect, but it does offer healthcare, free at the point of delivery, to every citizen, whereas (according to a news report I heard just now- can I really have been hearing right?) something like 40 million Americans have no access to healthcare whatsoever.