… like hostage victims love their hostage takers. The world’s most disheartening hash tag on Twitter today: #WeLoveTheNHS, throwing up lots of rather highly strung debates.
Why disheartening? As with most things in the political realm, one emotion dominates: Fear. Fear trumps everything else. Most of the hostile comments I get on this blog come from people absolutely terrified of something or other. For many unscrupulous politicians, fear is the simple and easy way to bypass people’s reason and make them believe… well, whatever you want them to believe, really.
In the UK it’s fear of losing free at the point of use health care that makes people go quite mad at any suggestion of tampering with it. In America they’re afraid that by adopting a universal health care model, especially a ‘single payer’ model where there’s only one source of health insurance they’ll end up with rationed health care ‘as bad as the UK’s’.
What both countries suffer from is a generally poor standard of health care – for different reasons, but enough for there to be some political will for change.
America’s health care is the most expensive, per head, in the world. As a side note: contrary to popular opinion, Health Insurance in the US is highly regulated with significant restrictions on what Health Insurance are allowed to exclude from their coverage. There’s also help for the poorest and pensioners – it is not a lassez faire free market system. There’s room for improvement, things that could be done better, actions that could be taken to start bringing down the cost of health care but, for all its faults there’s people really really scared of losing it.
There’s plenty of reasons to complain about the NHS, too – rationing, waiting lists, MSRA, half a million bureaucrats and poor cancer survival rates compared with the rest of Europe are obvious issues – saying ‘you love the NHS’ uncritically helps absolutely no-one… but things aren’t quite as bad as the Republicans would have you believe: Palin’s pressed the thermonuclear panic button by referring to ‘Death Panels’ which… which strongly suggests the GOP aren’t changing ‘any time soon’.
This sort of rhetoric is utterly toxic, but it’ll influence those who won’t be bothered finding out for themselves what the truth about the NHS really is. And, worst of all, it’s not even a real argument. It’s just fear-mongering and low politicking of the worst kind.
But I note with some irony it is the US system that is always used by NHS advocates in the UK as a terrifying example of the horrors that await a.. gulp.. privatised… gulp… National Health Service.
When Republicans use the UK as an example of a horror story, we call them propagandists and liars and cheats. But when we use America as an example of a horror story where people will be left dying in the streets? Well that’s WELL TRUE and so it’s perfectly fine.
Sheesh. I bang both your heads together.
Of course I’m left disheartened, wondering if it’s ever possible, anywhere in the world, to have a rational debate about health care.
