Now, I love a bit of limey bashing as much as everyone else, but this is ridiculous...
The National Health Service has become the butt of increasingly outlandish political attacks in the US as Republicans and conservative campaigners rail against Britain's "socialist" system as part of a tussle to defeat Barack Obama's proposals for broader government involvement in healthcare.
Top-ranking Republicans have joined bloggers and well-funded free market organisations in scorning the NHS for its waiting lists and for "rationing" the availability of expensive treatments.
As myths and half-truths circulate, British diplomats in the US are treading a delicate line in correcting falsehoods while trying to stay out of a vicious domestic dogfight over the future of American health policy.
Slickly produced television advertisements trumpet the alleged failures of the NHS's 61-year tradition of tax-funded healthcare. To the dismay of British healthcare professionals, US critics have accused the service of putting an "Orwellian" financial cap on the value on human life, of allowing elderly people to die untreated and, in one case, for driving a despairing dental patient to mend his teeth with superglue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/11/nhs-united-states-republican-healthMost hilariously of all some right wing editorial claimed that Stephen Hawking would be dead if he had been born in Britain.
There are, I think, two essential truths in international health policy. No-one sees fit to copy the National Health Service and no-one sees fit to copy the American system. Still, for all that we need NHS reform (hardly a surprise since just about every health system is under strain and needs tweaking), the picture of the NHS given by some of the people opposed to Obama's health plans is, well, not hugely accurate. Take, for instance, this Investors Business Daily editorial which claims that:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Everyone* has jumped on this and, quite reasonably, had some fun with it since, alas, it seems as though the writer is unaware that Professor Hawking is, um, British. Now it's possible that Hawking has private medical insurance, but as recently as April this year he was admitted to Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge. Which is, I believe, an NHS hospital. And last time I checked, Hawking hasn't been bumped off by some heartless NHS bureaucrat. At least, not yet.
Lord knows, the NHS has its problems and, yes, there's a degree of rationing. But there's rationing in just about every system. It just depends on how that rationing is organised and, to some extent, whether its existence is admitted. Ability to pay = rationing too. Equally, by any historical standard (different, to be sure, from international standards) the NHS actually, for all its cumbersome bureaucracy, performs pretty well. Could it be run more effificiently and cheaply? Almost certainly. Does it, on balance, offer a decent, though not world-beating, service for the money we spend on it? Probably.
The relevance of the NHS to American health care plans seems pretty limited anyway since, as best I can tell (though I try not to pay too much attention to these things) Obama doesn't actually plan on copying the NHS.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5255761/stephen-hawking-has-not-yet-been-murdered-by-the-nhs.thtmlSadly, whatever health care system they adopt there is still no cure for stupidity.
Topic: US right attacks NHS.