The UK’s National Health System (NHS) has been used as a political football this week, so I thought I’d make a few points addressed to friends in the US, to counter some of the BS that’s been thrown around.
1) Yes, the NHS is socialism in action. People pay taxes so that all can have healthcare. ALL. Yes, ALL. Americans will have to accept that their taxes will go up. They will have to accept that they are not just paying extra taxes for their own healthcare, they will be paying for everyone’s healthcare. Illegal immigrants that fetch up at emergency rooms, people working on minimum wage below the tax threshold, the elderly and the children of the feckless, taxpayers will pay for all of it, and the burden will fall hardest on the middle classes.
2) Taxes will go up. Everyone’s taxes will go up, including the pool boy, the maid and the people who make and bring you food in restaurants. Higher taxes will push wages up and the US will have to either get used to not having as much cheap labour as it presently does, or paying more for it.
3) Expect the medical profession to get very moral and sanctimonious about how your money is spent. Those doctors who today won’t give you a bandaid unless you have a credit card, once they are in the pay of the state will suddenly come out with “how dare you tell the medical profession who it can and can’t treat… we’ll treat illegal immigrants if we want… Hypocratic oath….” The NHS has caused a phenomenon called ‘health tourism’ in the UK. Because NHS staff refuse to do the work of ‘immigration officials’. They won’t check that people who present at hospitals are UK citizens and actually entitled to free treatment. We have no idea how much this costs us… because the NHS will not measure it.
4) When my father died of cancer, he received the best possible care imaginable. With all the money in the world, I could not have bought better treatment, and it did not cost me one cent.
5) If my father had had Alzheimer’s, I would have had to fight to get him the care he needed to die with dignity. Cancer is an emotive disease and attracts a lot of political attention. Alzheimer’s isn’t. When the state pays for your health, it will become a political football.
6) Some medical treatment IS rationed in the UK. There are long waiting lists for many routine treatments such as hip replacements. Some people lose their sight because of waiting too long for routine treatment for Macular Degeneration. If you have money you can jump the queue, but remember, you have already paid for your healthcare once through higher taxes, so you’re not going to have as much wealth and savings as you do now.
7) If you have a serious road accident in the UK, you will get extremely high quality treatment extremely fast. Probably as good as anywhere. If you tear up your hand with a power tool or have some other mid-ranking accident, you might spend half a day at the emergency room waiting to get it stitched.
8) The NHS was introduced 60 years ago when antibiotics were still a novelty. At that time if you got sick, you went to hospital. You might have an operation… you might not… and you would either get better or you would die. There simply wasn’t the range of expensive drugs and other interventions that are available now, but the NHS has not been able to change and reflect that because ‘free healthcare’ has become a political sacred cow.
There are other state healthcare systems in the world. The choice is not between the iniquities of the current US healthcare system and the iniquities of the NHS. You could have a system like the one in the Netherlands, Sweden, or even Canada.
9) No system is perfect, and there is no such thing as FREE healthcare. Someone always pays for it somewhere.
