British Leaders Defend Their Health Service

British Leaders Defend Their Health Service
By ROBERT MACKEY
Copyright by The New York Times
August 14, 2009, 12:38 PM
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/british-leaders-defend-their-health-service/


Updated | 6:46 p.m. Responding to attacks on Britain’s National Health Service by opponents of health insurance reform in the United States, British political leaders from the left and the right have taken to the airwaves, the blogwaves and the twitwaves to defend the government-run health care system known as the NHS.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a break from his summer holiday to join a chorus of Britons voicing support for the system on Twitter — where the tag #welovetheNHS became a trending topic — writing:

PM: NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death. Thanks for always being there #welovetheNHS

The same day, Mr. Brown also “re-tweeted” this declaration of affection for the service posted by his wife, Sarah Brown:

#welovetheNHS - more than words can say

Not to be outdone ahead of an election, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron, also interrupted his holiday to write on his blog:

Just look at all the support which the NHS has received on Twitter over the last couple of days. It is a reminder — if one were needed — of how proud we in Britain are of the NHS. Millions of people are grateful for the care they have received from the NHS - including my own family. One of the wonderful things about living in this country is that the moment you’re injured or fall ill — no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you’ve got — you know that the NHS will look after you.

Mr. Cameron also said in this video interview published on the BBC’s Web site that he disagreed strongly with the “eccentric views” of a member of his own party who has criticized the NHS during several recent appearances on Fox News. In the interview, Mr. Cameron restated his pledge to expand the NHS if the Conservatives win the next general election in Britain and said, “We think its a really important and great national institution.”

The comments from British readers below this post suggest that Britain’s politicians are outdoing themselves to praise the NHS for the very good reason that it is genuinely popular with voters.

The Conservative politician who has appeared several times on Sean Hannity’s program to attack the NHS is Daniel Hannan. During this recent interview on Fox, Mr. Hannan suggested that America was now contemplating a move “towards a Cuban or North Korean system” and said that reforms proposed by Democrats could empower the government to decide “literally whether you can live or die.” While he was in New York, Mr. Hannnan continued his critique of the NHS in an interview with another Fox host, Glenn Back.

A few months earlier, in another discussion with Mr. Hannity, Mr. Hannan called the founding of the NHS “a mistake” and said, “The reality is, it hasn’t worked — it has made people iller.”

Another response to Mr. Hannan’s intervention in the American health care debate came on Friday in the form of this YouTube message from the Labour politician John Prescott, who served as Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister, in which he called on American to ignore what he termed Mr. Hannan’s “tissue of lies” about the NHS:

Mr. Hannan also writes a blog on the Web site of The Telegraph, and he interrupted his own holiday to heap scorn on Mr. Prescott, writing, “Any suggestion that the NHS might be improved upon is shouted down as an attack on the people in it — which is precisely the point I was making about how hard it is to reform so large a bureaucracy.”

Mr. Hannan, of course, is not the only person trying to discredit government intervention in the health insurance market by pointing to the British system. As my colleague Bernie Becker pointed out in a post on our new blog Prescriptions, an editorial in Investors Business Daily (which has now been corrected) made this argument about the kind of people who would suffer if their health care were left to a government-run system like the NHS:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

The reason the editorial has been corrected is that Mr. Hawking is, of course, British, and he does depend on the NHS for his health care. “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told The Guardian this week. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

I.B.D.’s fantastic editorial lead the British blog Heresy Corner to post this satirical account of Mr. Hawking receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama this week in Washington.

Television ads attacking the NHS (and Canada’s government health insurance) have also been broadcast by Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, the Republican National Committee and the conservative Club for Growth.

Britain’s Channel 4 News reported on Friday that two British women featured in the ad by Conservatives for Patients’ Rights said that they support the NHS despite its problems and were duped into sharing their personal tragedies by producers who said they were being interviewed for a documentary, not an attack ad. PolitiFact.com, a nonpartisan site that won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its work, said the Club for Growth’s ad on the NHS was “misleading.”

The attacks do seem to be influencing some voters. In this video report shot in Maryland this week, a woman told a reporter for the BBC that “people from Canada and Great Britain keep telling us, ‘Do not do health plan because it does not do anything.’ ” Asked, “Which people in Britain are telling you that?” the woman replied that they were “on the news all the time.” At the same event a man told the BBC that the British health care system was terrible. Asked if he had ever experienced it, the man replied, “I don’t need to, or I’d be dead.”

Update | 5:02 p.m. Inevitably, as a reader points out, there is now a Facebook group devoted to this issue, called “Defend The NHS From Yankee Conservatives!”