The NHS isn't NICE

I just flew back from a 2 weeks in Florida this morning. A bit of business and a lot of pleasure. I always enjoy trips to the USA and I'm always pleased to get home. The highlight of the trip was snorkelling off the Florida keys. Apart from the Great Barrier reef in Australia, there are some of the worlds finest reefs in the Keys. Swimming out to see the statue of "Christ of the Deep" (Pictured left - modelled on Christ of the Abyss in Naples Harbour) was a truly awesome experience.

Unfortunately I also spent a fair bit of time watching the coverage of the healthcare debate on the various news channels. Watching FOX News in particular reminded me why I don't buy papers published by Rupert Murdoch. I have a theory as to why the American right is so vehemently opposed to a government run system of national healthcare. I believe that they've realised that once the American public gets it, they may just twig that all the right wing nonsense about the superiority of the free market will be exposed for the load of old tosh that it is. I'm not completely blinkered about the merits of some aspects of capitalism. I've run a successful business for 30 years. I do it better than any of the council run initiatives I've seen. It's just that there are some things the state unquestionably does better. A quick hop over the channel to France shows what a properly funded nationalised rail system can do. This has delivered huge benefits to the nation. Closer to home, it is patently obvious to just about everyone (apart from our supposedly Socialist government) that the Post Office is something that just has to stay in public hands. As to putting men on the moon, only a government backed program at NASA could have done that.

The most obvious system though, isn't rocket science. The NHS, for all it's faults serves the population of this country superbly. I've got a sister and a brother-in-law who work in health provision in Florida. My brother in law was a top guy at one of the biggest healthcare providers in the USA, with responsibility for the healthcare of the US congress in the mid 90's. He's a fantastic doctor, who has saved more lives than many people on the planet have had hot dinners. He worked in emergency medicine for many a year and when he expresses an opinion I listen. His view? That the system in the US fails to deliver for an alarming number of people. Many others are stuck in jobs they hate, just to ensure their family are covered by a health scheme. The American system is, to my mind, a system of quasi serfdom.

Due to the spells of showers during our stay, I watched many of the live Town Hall meetings on CNN and FOX news. What outraged me was the way the networks, especially FOX, would edit these. The most telling interjection I saw was watching the live coverage of failed Presidential candidate John McCain taking a town hall session. Possibly 90% of the audience were supportive of his "anti (Obama's reform)" stand. If you watched FOX's edited highlights, you would most certainly have missed the most telling contribution. Early on McCain started running down the NHS. He said that with the NHS and NICE (the committee that decides whether we can get drugs), some Multiple Sclerosis sufferers have to wait up to 2 years in the UK for treatment. There was howls of outrage from the audience. This clip got widely shown in the edited highlights. What wasn't shown was a woman who stood up and told how a relative of hers in the USA had to wait 20 years for treatment until she qualified for medicaid, by which time she was totally bedridden. Other commentators told all manner of lies about the NHS. One lie which came out time and time again was that people over 70 are denied treatments and operations under the NHS.

I know this to be untrue. My mother, who sadly passed away last year, had an operation on the NHS to fix a degenerating vertebrae in february last year. The operation was a complete success. My mother suffered from cancer in 1970 and was cured by the NHS. She would have been uninsurable in the USA after that. My folks ran a small business. They would have been financially destroyed under the US system.

Time and time again, right wing US pundits slagged off NICE as a "Death Panel". Sure, there is a degree of rationing of life saving drugs. There is rationing of healthcare in the USA as well. The way it works there is that if you are poor and uninsured, you don't get the care you get if you are rich and in a scheme.

Before my mother had a massive stroke which robbed her of her eloquence in 2000, she was a fierce and passionate defender of the NHS to all and sundry. She remembered the days before it was introduced, when families were broken by the cost of paying for treatment for sick children. She was nearly killed by diptheria in the 1930's and so she was a passionate believer in immunisation and the good of public health schemes.

What disturbs me most about the US healthcare debate is the fact that they pay twice the amount of their (much greater) GDP than we do for health, but a whole section of their population has been failed by this system. The defenders of the private system shriek "freedom and choice" as their clarion call. People like my mother who got cancer have no choice. They just get dropped in America. Children of the poor have no choice in America. The rich and the powerful have a fine choice, but I judge a society by how it treats its weakest, most unfortunate members, not how it looks after it's richest and most powerful.

That's why I'm glad to be home.