An American neocon defends the National Health Service

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/6048367/An-American-neocon-defends-the-NHS.html

Carol Gould may belong to the American political Right, but witnessing how the NHS cared for her severely ill British friend gave her a new repect for "socialised" medicine.


By Carol Gould
Published: 11:43AM BST 18 Aug 2009


In the wake of the public outcry in the United States that has seen the conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh apparently compare universal health care to some sort of neo-Nazi Reich I thought I would recount a story from earlier this year. Let me make my political leanings clear from the outset: I am a neocon. Having supported the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush triumvirate and their Iraq and Afghanistan interventions I have duly enraged thousands who listen to me on the BBC and watch me on Sky and Press TV. Notwithstanding this my views on universal health care are strictly Socialist.

...

In mid-November my close friend Dee rang to tell me she was feeling odd. She was house-sitting for a friend in London and said she had eaten some freshly-baked soda bread from a new patisserie in St John’s Wood and had begun to feel ill. When she worsened I began to think that the bread had been destined for a Russian oligarch or Litvinenko-esque exile, as her symptoms were so severe. On day two she told me she was riven with fever and chills; I told her it was ‘flu but she said she would see a homeopath.

Within a day she was in hospital. She was on Life Support at St. Mary’s Hospital, where the prognosis was 50-50.

...

I will stop here for a moment and say that whenever I go public about the beauty of universal health care I am inundated with hate mail from Britons who have had to wait months for vital surgery and by Americans terrified of a bungling system being brought in to the USA. The NHS is far from perfect and there are indeed many horror stories. One can posit that there are negative scenarios in private medicine as well. How will I ever forget the beautiful manager of my local salon who at a tender age died in cardiac arrest because the ‘celebrity private hospital’ in which she was giving birth had insufficient cardiac rescue units available?

...

I have watched a miracle unfold as dozens of modestly paid but utterly devoted medical practitioners have laboured to bring my friend back from the brink. In an environment teeming with the highest levels of professionalism I have watched every aspect of life support administered with meticulous care. In the United States, Dee’s mountain of drugs, equipment support, tubes, disposables and gallons of intravenous feeds and Jevity liquid food plus plain old man and woman-hours would have cost over $1 million by now.

...

Harry Truman resented the election of Attlee and was obdurate about a postwar healthcare scheme, but had Franklin Delano Roosevelt lived he would have seen the post-war British model brought to the USA. He was a consummate politician who had managed to pass Social Security through a reactionary Congress by enlisting the skills of Republican John Gilbert Winant. FDR rewarded him with the Court of St James during the long years of war, and Winant went on to become the most beloved of any US ambassador. Now that Barack Obama is pursuing universal health care for Americans he needs to woo every ally he can enlist and will need every skill in his repertoire to amalgamate the pharmaceutical and medical insurance companies into a viable and cooperative entity. Knowing how resourceful and success-driven Americans are -- I do believe it is in their DNA -- universal health care will evolve into a better system than has ours in the United Kingdom.

Dee is a living example of the NHS at its best; Rush Limbaugh’s swastikas signified a low point in the current discourse. I urge my fellow Americans to go forward with a system that at its worst can be fixed but at its best embodies the gift of life.