Health Care Scare In Britian - Not Socailzed Medicine, But Privatized Medicine

We in the U.S. have a rather uncharming tendency to think that our way is always the "right way," regardless of potential evidence to the contrary, and nowhere is this tendency clearer than in our discussions about national health care. Ask your average U.S. citizen about "socialized medicine" and you'll likely get a response that is almost pathologically hostile to the very concept of taxes paying for medical coverage. We reinforce our distrust of public health care initiatives by recounting horror stories of "someone we know" who was once forced to endure the barbaric overtures of a publicly subsidized medical system, somewhere far away. 

The reality of socialized, or publicly subsidized, medical systems are far less frightening to most of the world - probably because the U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't have one. Indeed, most other countries view our method of "health care for those who can afford it" as the barbaric type. Case in point is yesterday's L.A. Times foreign correspondence article, "British Fear American-Style Health Care":

Ask a Briton to describe "American-style" healthcare, and you'll hear a catalog of horrors that include grossly expensive and unnecessary medical procedures and a privatized system that favors the rich. For a people accustomed to free healthcare for all, regardless of income, the fact that millions of their cousins across the Atlantic have no insurance and can't afford decent treatment is a farce as well as a tragedy.

But critics here warn that a similarly bleak future may await Britain if a government plan to put more power in the hands of doctors and introduce more competition into the NHS succeeds — privatization by stealth, they say.

So frightening is the Yankee example that any British politician who values his job has to explicitly disavow it as a possible outcome. Twice.

"We will not be selling off the NHS, we will not be moving towards an insurance scheme, we will not introduce an American-style private system," Prime Minister David Cameron emphatically told a group of healthcare workers in a nationally televised address last week.

In case they didn't hear it the first time, Cameron repeated the dreaded "A"-word in a list of five guarantees he offered the British people at the end of his speech.

"If you're worried that we're going to sell off the NHS or create some American-style private system, we will not do that," he said. "In this country we have the most wonderful, precious institution and also precious idea that whenever you're ill … you can walk into a hospital or a surgery and get treated for free, no questions asked, no cash asked. It is the idea at the heart of the NHS, and it will stay. I will never put that at risk."

Ironically, citizens of countries with some form of subsidized medicine or universal health insurance which guarantees basic medical care to everyone regardless of medical history or ability to pay are in many ways more informed about the problems of a privatized health care system than we who actually have one tend to be. So regardless of your individual stance on socialized medicine, in the internet age as our world gets ever smaller, it is important for us as global citizens to remember that the "right way" to do something is almost always a matter of perspective...and sometimes we could learn a thing or two from people with a different perspective.

UPDATE 6/15/11 - It seems the Canadians aren't interested in cloning our health care system either.