News Flash! This Isn’t Venezuela

The father-in-law has long been closely looked after by his National Health Service (NHS) doctor.  Last Friday, he headed to his local hospital for a consultant’s assessment.  The reason?: the question had arisen in his doctor’s mind a during a check-up a couple of weeks ago if he might need some non-emergency cardiovascular work.

Surprisingly perhaps to many Americans, no, he didn’t have to wait six to nine years to see the consultant either. Fortunately, it turned out there is nothing to worry about.  No need for surgery as, thankfully, he’s fine.

It is perhaps worth noting also that the in-laws adamantly refuse to move house from where they’ve lived in London for nearly 40 years.  One major reason is because that doctor looks after them so well.  They don’t want to start afresh with a new doctor who doesn’t know them personally.

So much for the constant drumbeat about how those who aren’t “fortunate” enough to inhabit “the best [health care] system in the world” are routinely denied a choice of doctor.  He happens to be the same GP who, incidentally, was ours too when we lived in the vicinity of the in-laws.  A few years back he had one day even turned up at our front door, medical bag in hand, to make a house call.

That’s right: a house call.

As we chewed over matters in expressing our relief at the good news regarding her Dad, the Wife — having witnessed in the last few weeks when we were in the States, the over-the-top Limbaugh-ist, Fox-ite, everyone in Canada dies while waiting to get in to see a doctor, bombast — sarcastically observed, “But don’t Americans realise that all us British people die while waiting years to see a doctor?!”

Separately, the mother-in-law wondered aloud, “Americans don’t understand how it works here.  That’s a shame.  Before the war [WWII], only the rich saw doctors: my mother avoided doctors for us because it was too expensive.  Americans do so much better at so many things than we do here.  They would have an even better American NHS.”

At that suggestion, yours truly responded that the chance of an American version is very slim.  Why, she asked?  Because, yours truly went on, Americans are being broadsided with anti-NHS propaganda at a level unheard of in recent memory.

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The nonsense being foisted on the American public is indescribable and consists of a litany of rubbish too numerous even to hope to begin to detail here.  But what yours truly believes may be fairly observed is this: with nearly every commercial break, on seemingly every “talk” show, and even in the midst of so-called “informational” TV news programs, Americans are being beset and (willfully?) confused owing to an appalling barrage of what may be described only as ridiculous distortions and disinformation.  One small, online example:

“Flag” Yourself as an opponent of government-run, socialistic healthcare

Opposing reform on that supposedly heady basis merely “flags” one up as decidedly ignorant.  In 1935, our grandparents and great-grandparents were told to recoil in terror at the creeping Bolshevism that was Social Security.  In 1965, Medicare was bound to be the undoing of the republic.  Now, universal care has become the latest bogeyman.

This blog did not discover this yesterday.  Yours truly has been living this subject for over a decade and writing about it intermittently for just over two years.  In sharing as honestly as possible what yours truly has seen, the goal has always been to attempt to bring to the table some actual personal experience on how matters are actually handled here, in order to share some of that with readers back home.

So let’s here, again, make this point once more: frankly, nobody with any brains is in favor of  “government-run socialistic healthcare.”

So Fox News needn’t worry.  Still, every day, every hour, every minute, Americans continue to be be spun tales and fed (empty) headers like the immediately above.  As if reforms, and perhaps even a state option, somehow means utter personal medicinal, and even national, disaster?

Better to try to hold on to what they got, they are warned.  And if you don’t have already, well, that’s just tough.  ‘Cause what will come will surely be worse.

But the reasonable possibility that, for most people, it might be an improvement?  Of course that suggestion is never allowed to mess up the horror narrative.

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The scaremongering — Sarah Palin is accusing President Obama’s health care plan of looking to create a “death panel” that would weigh whether her parents or son Trig were “worthy of health care.”… — borders on disgraceful, and this blog doesn’t assert such a thing lightly.  Yours truly does not want to alienate any readers.  However when it comes to conservatives yours truly knows he is in a decided U.S. minority, because this blog has come strongly to favor implementing “universal health care” in the States, including with a public option.

It wishes earnestly Republicans were taking the lead, because they’d do it better.  Instead, sadly, they have chosen to dig in and re-fight Social Security and Medicare all over again for a whole new generation.  As if it were 1935 and 1965 all over again.

They appear to have forgotten that they lost those fights.  They also forget that they then spent decades afterwards on the electoral defensive, trying to recover.  And now, ironically, they find themselves championing at every turn how they are so determined to preserve both.

One wonders what Ms Palin’s great-grandparents thought of Social Security at its outset?  If an NHS is good enough for British Conservatives, that should at least give American conservatives serious pause.  Why Republicans can’t this time ’round manage instead to get ahead of the curve and avoid a similar “wilderness” period?  It is depressing in the extreme.

A public option is not the second coming of Chavez’s Venezuela.  Although you’d think it were if you listen to the near-hysteria enveloping the air waves and the net in the States, and the snake oil being peddled to Americans who merely crave facts and reasonable answers.  It is almost as if the U.S. is now engaging in this in a policy and experience vacuum?

As if this sort of thing hasn’t been done before elsewhere?  Well it has.  Here, Britons don’t need to worry about health cover for college age young adults.  Nor does business have to decline to pay exorbitant premiums to (some extent) cover employees.  Nor does any employee have to worry about losing his cover if he loses his job.

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Because the moment he is born, a Briton is covered until the day he dies.  That latter, though, if we heed some in the States especially, the NHS helps speed along.  Some even try to help create that impression through snake oil carefully edited blog quotations:

Having government-provided health insurance doesn’t do a lot of good when the health care is delivered by apathetic, uncaring, unionized, government health workers.

Consider this story (July 5, 2009) in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper:

Cancer patient Pamela Goddard battled against cancer for 50 years before she died of an infected bedsore during a stay in hospital.

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The cancer did not kill her, but a bedsore did…

If you read the actual Telegraph piece, compare it to that post.  What from the piece did that blogger choose NOT to cite?  This — the Telegraph’s second sentence, which immediately followed the subheader that was quoted above:

Pamela Goddard had great faith in the NHS. It had, after all, kept her alive for more than half her 82 years.

Notice also how that blog doesn’t permit comments, which is probably just as well.  After all, in case readers who actually read closely wished to note such a glaring omission in an anti-NHS post, they might well point out that sentence omission in the comments.  Or someone might even have shared the story of the kidney transplant-waiting patient plucked by RAF helicopter from a cruise ship off Britain’s coast when a kidney suddenly was available, and then flown, the transplant window closing by the minute, 400 miles during the night to reach the hospital in the nick of time — on the NHS.

And in our “best system in the world?”  There are no death-resulting mistakes due to wrong diagnoses, or hospital sloppiness, or botched operations, right?  Which is why there are, uh, no malpractice lawsuits in the U.S., right?

Actually, in 2004, it was estimated that medical errors in the U.S. kill some 200,0oo people annually.  However, the NHS particularist murder fantasy doesn’t jibe with this other uncomfortable fact.  Every political party in Britain across the entire political spectrum backs the health service to the hilt, likely (unsurprisingly) because the super-overwhelming majority of the voting population does.

And somehow, despite the NHS supposedly knocking off patients regularly, the average life expectancy of the British according to the CIA World Factbook, 2009?  79.01 years.

The average life expectancy in the U.S.?  78.11 years.

Does that longer life average have anything to do with British health care?  Who knows?  But one thing it demonstrates is that Britain is hardly — as the Wife once noted in another context — the health care “banana republic” U.S. critics (usually who possess little to no first-hand knowledge of the NHS) desperately want to imagine it is.

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Shield of Achilles correctly raises the issue we all knew was overdue: covering illegal immigrants.  It is an important question, but it is likely to be used as a wedge by which to try to alter the terms of the argument: scream to “middle America” that illegals will “get,” and that will certainly make middle class Americans question the entire notion of “universality”?

But what illegals “get” or don’t is a fundamentally separate matter.  What should matter to Americans first and foremost?  How about this?: what Americans “get”.

Nevertheless, illegals had better not be part of any U.S. “plan”.  A “universal coverage” line, unfortunately, has got to be drawn somewhere.  A national boundary is as good a place as any.

Good grief, even the NHS here in Britain does NOT cover non-residents.