I'm having a look at that interview with the Godfearing woman now. I note that the station trailer identifies it as "Conservative", so they're explicitly a broadcaster with a political agenda.
It's strange to hear the term "single-payer" system, because of course we don't call it that, but I suppose she's explaining for an American audience. She speaks of personal experience of the NHS. She says there's "a tremendous amount of rationing", that the standard of care is much lower than in America, and that people are so used to this crap care that it's all they expect.
Now let's think about this. Any estimates of her age? At least 50. Possibly more. (I suspect a good facelift there actually - she could even be close to 60.) So, when would we date the experiences she's talking about? 1960s, I'd say. If not late 50s. This isn't stuff that happened last week, or even last year. How can any experiences of early NHS treatment in those days possibly compare to medicine as we know it in 2009? It's ridiculous.
Also, she's not native English. She has a German name and a German family. I think this background also influences her interpretation of events that happened when she was a child or a very young woman.
So what's she saying?
She's going on and on about poor care and low expectations. Well, guess what. My expectations are a lot higher now than when I was a child in the 1960s. Because medicine has advanced and there is a lot more available! You can't compare one system 30+ years ago with another system now!
Of course, "there's a tremendous amount of rationing" is simply a lie. She's simply parroting that from no knowledge. It just isn't true.
And what's this about lower death rates from cancer in the USA? All the metrics we've used to assess peformance comparisons have shown the USA to be slightly poorer. Do the Americans just not live long enough to develop cancer? This was simply not explained. If Americans aren't dying of cancer, what
are they dying of? Or does private medicine confer immortality?
Now we get to the lack of dental anaesthesia. She says it wasn't standard. She's totally lying - or possibly totally mistaken and too lazy to check her facts. This was obviously quite a while ago (she was a child), and maybe she had a dentist who thought suffering was good for the soul or something, but even in the 1950s this would have been an aberrant experience. I do think that people have a duty to find out the facts before they relate one long-ago memory as if it represents universal practice. It has been absolutely SOP to provide dental anaesthesia in the NHS for at least the past 50 years (and the NHS is only 60 years old).
Now the stroke thing. How long ago was this, I ask? It's complete gobbledegook, and the story just doesn't hang together. It sounds like a very young person who simply didn't understand what's going on, and isn't remembering it or communicating it clearly. She took her grandmother to a small cottage hospital, by the sound of it. And there was nobody there. Did granny have a stroke at all? How does anyone know?
I'm struck by the ignorance of normal NHS service that account demonstrates. I wonder how much of this is influenced by a German immigrant family not familiar with procedure, and all this happening in the 1950s or 60s. If granny was really seriously ill, and for some reason she showed up at an unstaffed cottage hospital, then someone would have dialled 999 for an ambulance to take her somewhere with an A&E department. Whatever was wrong with granny, the account suggests she was not seriously ill.
But then, asking if they can see a doctor privately? If there's no doctor there, then how can they see him, NHS or private? This is the behaviour of recent immigrants without any real experience of how it all works. And who said, "would you trust a doctor you were paying?" anyway? We're listening to the long-ago memories of a 50 or 60-year-old woman of something that happened when she was young. It's highly unlikely any NHS nurse would have said that, even in the very early days. I wonder, if this was said at all, if it was her grandmother who said it.
The rest of it is just a rant repeated from her octogenarian German grandmother. Nobody cares about old people. We don't matter. They'll just leave us to die of whatever we get.... A cantankerous old immigrant lady. Some time in the 1960s. Not understanding that she was in the wrong place to get emergency treatment, and as she wasn't seriously ill, nobody was falling over themselves to do anything. So that's the quality of information that's informing the US health debate!
Her uncle died of a penicillin allergy, because a doctor gave him penicillin when he was allergic. But we're not getting the full story. Did he know he was allergic to penicillin? Did the doctor know? 1960s, remember, maybe earlier. Could it be that his death was the first anyone knew he had that allergy?
Which might explain why nobody sued. You can't sue if there has been no negligence. But Godfearing lady simply declares that the family had no recourse, that they could not sue the NHS doctor. At least she had the grace to say "at least, when I was there" this time, but so far as I know that has never been true. You can sue the pants off the NHS if you're the victim of negligence. But not if you suffer an unfortunate accident.
Again, this account sounds like that of a young person who was peripheral to the events and is just giving us her impressions. But madam, don't you think you should check up on whether NHS doctors can be sued for negligence before you make statements like that? I tried to google it, and mainly just got a load of ambulance-chasing lawyer web sites, but
even these make the position clear. She could have checked this quite easily, but she didn't.
She then goes on to criticise the level of preventative screening available in the NHS. I'm now wondering what the hell she knows about this anyway? She obviously left England a long time ago, and is only dredging up childhood memories without checking her facts. One of the NHS's great strengths is its preventative approach. National screening programmes take in the whole population and people are called in automatically.
She later announces that even uninsured Americans are more likely to have been screened for certain things than British or Canadian citizens. Where did she get this information, when her knowledge of the NHS is so poor that she thinks people don't get dental anaesthetics and can't sue for negligence? Do we know what's skewing this, if these are tests that are actually ineffective (some screening tests are counterproductive and not recommended by universal healthcare systems), and what else isn't she telling us?
Berlusconi had his pacemaker operation in Cleveland because it's the best in the world. Good grief, we went over all this in the Stossel thread. Berlusconi wants to be treated like royalty, so is it any surprise that he has a routine procedure in the USA, where money will get you such treatment?
She's just bouncing all over the place with random right-wing opinions now, much of which we've heard many times from the right-wing Americans here. Maybe physycians would opt out of the universal system and set up their own schemes? Well, not here they don't. Pink blouse tells us about Harley Street, and how the care there is absolutely superb, but can't be accessed by ordinary people.
Another lie. Every single consultant in Harley Street has a top NHS consultancy post. That's what gives them the cachet to be able to build that sort of private practice. They're doing the Harley Street work on top of their contracted hours for the NHS. So, Top Plastic Surgeon's day job is reconstructing faces destroyed by accident and disease, but if you've got the money he'll do a facelift for you on his day off. (And on his holidays he'll go to India and spend his time repairing birth defects
pro bono.)
Politicians would think differently if they had to live in England for a year and put up with the NHS. O rly? This is the NHS that provides care for all our politicians and their families, saved Gordon Brown's eyesight, gave Sam Galbraith a lung transplant, and cared for David Cameron's severely epileptic son? Sure, it's good to make the parliamentarians use the universal healthcare system. It concentrates their minds wonderfully.
This was such a disconnected string of ancient half-remembered anecdotes and boilerplate right-wing American propaganda it's hard to know what to say. Other than, if that's the best they can find, the NHS must be doing something right.
Like flying people to Sweden for very rare, specialised treatments.
And giving little girls heart transplants.
For goodness sake, Americans, find out what it's really like here, which is frankly the bargain of all time, and stop listening to people who are either wittering about things they know nothing about, or frankly lying.
Rolfe.
I'll come back to this in a moment,
Would a US insurer fly a patient to Canada if all the specialists were busy?
