I'd say ignorance - there's a number of facts that simply go against people's preconceived notions of how such a system SHOULD work. Plus the confusion over application of "best" - the US is probably still the leader in medical research.
Well, as the biggest and richest superpower on the face of the globe, and the one that managed to put a man on the moon, I should bloody well hope so.
Mind you, not sure it's that clear cut is you start to control for population size. Did I mention the
Wellcome Trust? "The world's largest medical research charity funding research into human and animal health."
In my experience, many Americans just BELIEVE it would have to be vastly more expensive to have UHC. Discovering the low administrative overhead of Medicare came as a shock to me, I recall. Politicians really need to hit the conservative points with UHC proposals - easy transition, lowered expenditures, cutting bureaucracy, lowered overhead for small business, etc. There'd be resistance to believe at first, but I feel like the conservative intelligencia would fracture under factual pressure.
I'm quite shocked by all the knee-jerk declarations that "socialism" is the way to hell in a handbasket. We wouldn't mind a bit more of it here. There's a lot more than just subsidising a few lazy scroungers. The lazy scroungers are just an inevitable side-effect of a decent safety-net. Unless you make the safety net absolutely intolerable, which is unconscionable, there's always going to be some low-hair-line knuckle-dragger who's going to prefer to relax in the safety net to getting off his backside and doing some work. But who would want to live that sort of life anyway? But sometimes it seems as if many of the American posters would rather have almost
any other alternative but one in which someone who hasn't been a paragon of abstemiousness and industry gets something for nothing. Even if it's a lifesaving drug.
We're big enough and rich enough that we can afford to subsidise a few scumbags if it's the price of making as sure as we can be sure that nobody dies because they can't afford what they need to live.
When we say, look, never mind the law enforcement and the foreign diplomacy and so on, you still have a lot of socialism. Schools, libraries, fire brigade, street lighting, lots more. Do you think people should only be allowed to use the public school system, or borrow a book from the library, or have your house saved from a blaze, if you're on the breadline? That everybody else, the people who are actually paying for these services through their taxes, should be forbidden from using them, and forced to pay all over again for their own services? And amazingly enough, some of these people say absolutely yes. They don't approve of publicly-provided anything.
Apparently because it's communism. Did the McCarthy era really scar the entire nation that badly?
When I was staying in Michigan last autumn, my hostess and her son had both worked for the highways department. I hadn't realised just how
new your country is. I'm used to travelling along roads the bloody
Romans built. But in Michigan, the land was all claimed, and nobody had built any proper roads. My hostess and her son were both involved in getting the roads built. He had to go to small landowners and offer them a pot of money to give up their land and move. And some of them didn't want to go and got the gun out and swore to defend their ancestral property. And Frank would say, the State needs your land. And he would get it.
So don't tell me about the Land of the Free. You just can't manage a lot of things without working together, and everyone contributing, and some people having to make sacrifices for the greater good. (But Frank told me about one guy who said, of no, you're paying me ten times what you just offered. Frank said, why? And the farmer said, because this land is 100% top-grade road gravel, and you want to quarry it to build your roads. So Frank got a geological survey done, and the farmer was quite right, and he got his price.)
Of all things that needs to be funded centrally, and paid for on the basis of ability to pay and not perceived risk or use of the system, healthcare is the #1. At the moment your middle classes are being screwed over by the system. They're being taxed even more than we are to fund the socialised part of the system (that they can't access), then they're having to pay through the nose to get insurance cover for themselves. And then when they need it there is a definite possibility that the insurance company will get obstructive and try not to pay out.
But half the population seems to be completely brainwashed. All I got in another thread was repeated posting of "Face it, your system sucks" from one US poster. Now I'm not saying it's perfect. There are always horror stories of people badly treated one way or another. But I have to say, nothing that scares me quite as much as the US system scares me. If someone in Britain isn't getting the treatment they need, you can demonstrate and complain and protest and write to your MP and GET SOMETHING DONE. Because that person is ENTITLED to treatment. But in the US, somebody falls through a crack in the system and gets a big-ticket problem when they don't have adequate insurance and sorry, too bad, them's the breaks, but you're not entitled.
But somehow, in America, "entitlement" is a dirty word.
NO IT'S NOT. You pay your taxes, you're entitled. You make too little money to have to pay tax? You're still entitled. You're a child and you don't have any income? You're still entitled. You're a tax dodger who hasn't contributed? We'll come after you for back taxes and interest and we'll prosecute you and send you to jail, but guess what? You're still entitled.
Because nobody should have to go without medical treatment in a rich western democracy in the 21st century, and an entire country of 300 million people who are so brainwashed that they would reject all the benefits of a system that works so much better elsewhere just because they don't like the word "socialist" or because they can't stand the idea of someone else getting something for nothing, or they believe the pack of big fat lying lies they've been fed about universal healthcare systems, needs a smack in the mouth until it comes to its senses.
Oh yes, and I declare an interest. Some of our politicians are so bloody dazzled by the glitz of the USA that they're buying into this "privatise everything" dogma. If it's Merkan, it must be The Best. If they're not stopped soon, they'll wreck the NHS by trying to apply "market forces" to it. The sooner the USA does something sensible, the better for us.
OK, I'll stop ranting. But I feel awfully sorry for you guys sometimes. KellyB is paying 50% of her household income in medical insurance. nobody should have to do that.
I hope Obama has the sense he appears to have been born with.
Rolfe.
