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

[sovay]

The European reality is nothing like the fantasy picture they're painting of it.

I am growing very tired of living in a culture where facts are not only dismissed as irrelevant to a debate, but actively to be shunned. It's like being trapped inside someone else's schizophrenia.

I guess it's progress of a sort when even the worst bigots know there are certain opinions too disgusting to speak in public.

Right now it just seems to mean they find new codes to couch it in. Attacking the American-ness of Obama's proposals, insisting he's not an American citizen, demonizing socialized medicine—it all comes down to not one of us. For which I can only think thank God, because their vision of America is not somewhere I feel at home, but I worry that far too many people in this country do.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One of the oddest manifestations of the blindness to facts was the assertion that Stephen Hawking would have died under the British system, when he is in fact a British citizen who credits the NHS with having saved his life.

There are two Americas. One that has led the rest of humannity over the past century- and another that has dragged far behind.

[sovay]

One of the oddest manifestations of the blindness to facts was the assertion that Stephen Hawking would have died under the British system, when he is in fact a British citizen who credits the NHS with having saved his life.

Yes. That was impressive. I wanted to revoke the author of that article's right ever to open their mouth in public again.

There are two Americas.

Well, tell me when I can go back to living in the sane one!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

They are interpenetrating parallel universes. You never know when you're going to flip from one to the other.