NHS: Not Perfect But Far Better Than The US Model

Every day seems to bring another story of how the greed of corporations, many of which seemed to have secured a cartelised or a monopolistic position, is distorting the economy and society. The credit crunch was stimulated by corporate greed, but the high bonuses that leading members of Barclays Bank are receiving while so many of us are without work or are losing our houses, have shown, it is not they who are paying the price. The clearest flexing of corporate might in the world at present is the concerted oppositon by health insurance companies in the USA to prevent President Obama introducing a free health care service in the USA to cover the 46 million Americans who have no health cover. That represents about 1 in 6 Americans who lack access to any health care that is not charitable; it is equivalent to the population of Belgium, Spain and Poland put together and is more than the number of adults in the UK. In addition, as many people who buy health insurance in the USA find it does not cover them if they develop a serious illness nor for existing conditions. Unsurprisingly life expectancy is lower in the USA than the UK, there are fewer only 70% as many hospital beds per head of population and infant mortality (i.e. children under 5) is 9 per 1000 compared to 6 per 1000 in the UK. Out of a population of 304 million, that means over 910,000 more children die each year in the USA than would be the case if they had the UK system. This is despite the fact that the UK only spends 8.3% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on healthcare compared to 16% in the USA, which suggests Americans are getting a more costly but less efficient service. In the UK, sometimes hospitals get overloaded but we do not have the situation as often occurs in the USA where an ambulance has to drive from hospital to hospital trying to find one that will take their uninsured patient. British hospitals need to have an increase in capacity and staffing, but never turn people away no matter what their nationality or background, simply because they lack the right insurance.

There are a number of sickening elements about the opposition to Obama's plans. One is that they are being portrayed on a moral basis. This is that somehow state control will lead to 'death panels' deciding when people have to die. This happens now de facto anyway, when families can no longer afford to fund keeping their relative alive. However, in the twisted US morality, ability to afford determining life expectancy is right, deciding on life expectancy depending on quality of life, is somehow wrong. The lie about 'death panelss' can be seen easily if you simply look at the fuss that has arisen in the UK about people even travelling to Switzerland for assisted suicide let alone any consideration of it being permissible in the UK. To conjure up this lie is just a scare tactic and to associate it with reference to British healthcare is offensive. Of course, Americans never consider any other country's viewpoint, so any indignation in the UK or Canada is dismissed as nothing.

The anti-public health care lobby in the USA has drawn support from the religious right who say they want freedom, whereas in fact they want to control people's lives far more than so-called 'big government' does, getting down to controlling their behaviour behind closed doors as well as in public. They lie and say public health care will lead to the elderly being advised every five years when they should end their lives. This is perverse fantasy dreamed up by companies wanting to kill any legislation that they feel would even minutely dent their income. To liken the NHS to approaches adopted by Hitler and Stalin offends not just British people now but also the memory of those who died opposing Hitler and Stalin, among them, Americans. Rick Joyner, a US pastor, has said that if Hitler and Stalin had had health care systems like the NHS it would have made it easier for them to kill millions of people. He forgets that they still killed millions of people and yet the NHS has kept millions of people from dying and suffering over its 61-year history. How patronising is that attitude to the people of the UK to think that we would sit by with a system that did us such harm for so long? Which plaent is Joyner referring to? Clearly not the one he is actually living on. These Americans are so arrogant that they somehow even seen decent, Christian Britons as imbeciles.

What gets me is that Obama's package is primarily aimed at those people who currently do not have health insurance, so why is it any concern of the companies that these people receive a service provided by the state? In that typical arrogant American way, they get offended even if anyone considers thinking differently to their assumptions. In addition, as the sub-prime mortgage fiasco proved, they always hope they can penetrate into those sectors of society not currently buying products from them, however risky or unsustainable such penetration is. Do they not understand that if these people could afford health insurance they would have bought it? They are offended that the state might provide a rival to them in getting health cover to these people, however remote the chance of them ever affording health insurance. US corporations, despite the anti-trust laws of the past, have become so used since the 1980s of having no limits to their activities that to see anything that intervenes in an area of the market, even one they are currently absent from, is an anathema to them.

The second sick thing about the opposition to health care proposals is how these people have attacked the public health care systems of the UK and Canada. Again, being Americans, they believe they have a right to make judgement over anyone else's system and yet not be judged themselves (refer back to my comments on the USA seeking exemption from war crimes laws). They portray the National Health Service (NHS) as somehow an evil system and inherently wrong in its philosophy and behaviour. Living in the UK, I know how clunky the NHS is. It is far from perfect, but ironically a lot of the problems it is currently facing, especially over hygeine in hospitals, stems from the situation created when the Thatcher government of the 1980s tried to move the service in the direction of the US model. If the internal market and competitive tendering for services, including cleaning, had not been introduced, then many more people would be alive today and the NHS would be in a better state. The reason why health in the general population is better in the UK than the USA is because of the NHS. It is not simply about treating people, it also does excellent work in preventative information too, to try to reduce the impact of the health challenges of modern living such as obesity, alcohol and tobacco consumption. The NHS is not perfect. I think it needs massively more funds. I would fund it to the extent that prescription charges introduce in 1950 could finally be scrapped and the care was free to everyone at point of use. The cap on National Insurance was taken off far too late. Everyone needs to pay towards the service and in accordance with their wealth. It is no argument to say that they will not use it. If the rich like they can see it as an insurance that their cleaner will not drop dead or that if they hit someone in their car while speeding, they will not get charged with murder because their victim will live.

I am glad that Gordon Brown, John Prescott, Lord Darzi and the trade union Unison are taking a strong stand against the Americans 'slagging off' (in Lord Mandelson's phrase) the NHS. I despise Mandelson, but am glad he is adding his weight to the defence of our health service. The maverick Conservative MP, Daniel Hannan, who feels that the NHS is an excessive burden on the UK, has a right to his opinion, but it is one that should be strongly contested, ridiculed even. The opposition to Obama's proposals is terrible, immoral and will lead to deaths. We cannot tell how many Americans have died unnecessarily because this opposition prevented Bill Clinton's 1993 health proposals being put into action, let alone the countless lives that have been blighted. This is about people's lives in exchange for profits, well not even that, in exchange for the imagination of profits that could be made and the fight to stop anyone involving themselves in that. Of course, Americans, especially on the extreme right, who feel under pressure now Bush have gone, feel they have the right to tell not only Americans but the whole world how to live. This leads to the deaths of not only Americans but people across the globe. The NHS is not perfect, but it is far, far better than the system the USA has. The American right profess to believe in God, but their god wants health care to be inaccessible to millions of people who will suffer as a result and prefers that people make bigger and bigger profits than care for others. Whoever their god is, he is not the God that millions of Americans and others believe in. Non-Americans need to stand up and tell Americans to stop using what we have done well as a weapon for their own perverse arguments. Britons are proud of the NHS and the vast majority want it improved not scrapped. Any American who falls ill in the UK can go to an NHS facility for emergency treatment, the reverse cannot be said of Britons in the USA. Of course, that does not matter to these opponents of Obama's proposals, they care about no-one, not even other Americans, just their potential to make money. May the NHS prosper and grow and be a model for decent, truly moral people to look to, rather than misuse as a tool for greedy objectives.

Sarah Palin as the Manchurian Candidate

It always very frightening as someone living in the UK to watch the US Presidential elections unfold. As we speak English coverage of the events is easily accessible to us. In addition there has been a long and close relationship between the USA and the UK which means that political developments in that country, especially in terms of foreign policy and to a great extent economic policy as well, impinges heavily here. Of course US foreign and economic policies impact on almost every country, but I think it is because British culture borrows so quickly from US culture that we feel it very quickly. In fact the average British person pays more attention to what is going on in the USA than they do to France let alone Germany or our other partners in the EU which are geographically much closer. Partly this is because so much of culture in terms of music, television and movies comes direct from the USA. In fact, though, this is sometimes good in showing up our differences as American humour though it sometimes works, can also fall flat in the UK and our perception of fashion and of the rest of the world is very different. Our attitude to guns and religion, two pillars of contemporary US society are completely opposite to those of the USA and this is why the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate last week is so alarming to us.

Britain is a secular society. Most of the people who send their children to faith schools are neither devout nor regular attenders at religious services. They just like the selectiveness of faith schools. Only about 4% of people in the UK regularly attend a church service. People from other faiths notably Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Judaism who live in the UK and make up a few million people are probably more attentive to attending, but even among these communities it is less common. Any DIY store has more people in it than any church on a Sunday in the UK and in some areas any DIY store has more Muslims in it than the local mosque on a Friday too. Tony Blair tried to make the UK more religious but most British people are not interested. We tend to see the American evangelicals let alone the fundamentalists as actually rather odd, and even quite scary. I think it is probably something to do with irony and cynicism which are so prevalent in the UK. We dislike anyone who is so certain of themselves and the message they are bringing. This is why even ardent Christians in the UK tend to adopt a far quieter tone than their US counterparts. I think it also stems from British individualism. Church means community and we are very against having anything to do with community, and as I have said before, British people do not like responsibility. They like power and to be heard, but they are unwilling to do anything in return and as any American (Christian) will tell you, a community needs people to put in as well as take out. So, when we see someone like Sarah Palin who introduced religion into the local government politics of a town of only 5000 people, then we get worried that it is going to spread even further upsetting our status quo.

As for guns, though we have far fewer gun deaths than the USA they hurt the British a great deal more. We also see a direct connection between the ownership of any guns and gun deaths, whereas the Americans, Palin in particular, see a difference between them happily gunning down bears and moose and shooting wolves from a helicopter and drive-by shootings in Los Angeles. We do not see a difference. Maybe it is because hunting in Britain has always been elitist, on privately owned land and not always involving guns. In the USA gun ownership is seen as a democratic element, in the UK it is seen as the realm of lunatics or snobs. Maybe I am wrong in this because Canada has more guns per head than the USA and the wide open spaces that the USA has but far lower gun crime.

Thus, you can see why Sarah Palin is frightening to the British. She comes across as a gun-toting fundamentalist and one who is liable to take that attitude into the foreign policy field with all the nightmare outcomes we have seen in Iraq. Of course, we have been here before. She is more articulate than George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan though sharing the same views. This is part of the problem. Bush has proven to be pretty ineffectual. In a crisis such as the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001, he just froze like a rabbit in headlights. However, that meant that the response though over-dramatic, was slightly less catastrophic than it might have been. Palin in such a position probably would have interned every Arabic-American in the country (bar those like the Bin Laden family who were close friends of the President and make great financial contributions, of course) stirring up racial hatred on a scale not seen in fifty years. If you think the Americans are no longer capable of this, you should have read what one Thai woman working in a shop on the East coast of the USA said following the 2004 tsunami. Whether clear of or oblivious to her origins, customer after customer said they felt that the people of South-East Asia had suffered the tragedy because they did not believe in God. This showed immense ignorance, as there are millions of Christians in the region anyway and where does it say God punishes unbelievers (since the Deluge) in this way? Also what does that imply about the three hurricanes currently lashing South-East USA, in the Bible belt? Anyway, the added element of Palin is that though her experience is not extensive, she comes across as efficient in a way Bush and Reagan never did. Efficiency combined with dogmatic views is very hazardous to people. Hitler was more efficient than Bush ever was, but equally as dogmatic, Stalin was equally dogmatic but even more efficient than Hitler so killed millions more and remained in power longer, thus you can why we worry over here in the UK.

Now, of course, you may say, well she is only going to be Vice-President. Who remembers anything Dan Quayle achieved or even Al Gore (he is better remembered for what he did after he left office than when in it)? I think Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice have had more impact during the Bush years than Dick Cheney (or even Bush himself). The hazard is of course, if that she may not remain vice-president for long. John McCain is currently 72. If he wins a second term in 2012 he will be 80 when he retires in 2016. Ronald Reagan was 70 when he came into office and 78 when he left and ill-health affected his career. Sarah Palin is currently only 43 and will be only 51 by 2016 so far younger at a time when you would be thinking that she would stand for President than many of her recent predecessors, Bush was 52, his father was 65 when he took office, Bill Clinton was 47. Of course with McCain's age she might take up the reins far sooner. McCain is seen as a maverick and not an extremist, certainly a more old-fashioned Republican in style than the New Right. This is why he picked Palin to appeal to the more extremist wing of the Republican party.

They have been growing in influence since the Reagan days and their policies are leading to abstinence as a state-promoted sexual policy and the teaching of creationism in a country which is turning up some of the most exciting fossils in the world. The death penalty has increased in usage year on year, guns are not being controlled and the prison population of the USA is close to 1 in 100 people in the country. With Palin in power they would not have to wheedle and persuade, their policies would become the mainstream and so shutting out the bulk of the American population. It will also hearten such extremists across the world raising global tensions and meaning that with the UK probably under a Conservative government lacking in any policies, that we too will begin to be bugged by their self-righteous, bigoted policies.

Why have I called Sarah Palin, the 'Manchurian Candidate'. Well this goes back to the movie 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962; remade 2004). In this the vice-presidential candidate has been kidnapped whilst fighting in the Korean War and taken to Manchuria (North-East China) where he was brain-washed by the Chinese before being returned to his unit. The conspiracy is to get a Communist-controlled person to become US President. This involves having another brain-washed person assassinating the president and so his vice-president taking over, as Lyndon Baines Johnson did after John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1961. Of course no-one needs to assassinate John McCain, he may fall infirm or die of his own accord. If not Palin only has to sit it out until 2016 to be elected on her own accord. So, as in the movie we have a vice-president ready to step into his shoes and assert a more radical policy. This is what the New Right have been working on for the past twenty-five years. They know they cannot probably get one of their own elected directly, at least not for a couple more decades, but this back-door way secures them control of the White House and God help the rest of the World, when this happens.