I think this guy hits the kernel of BHO's problem:
Most people would have poorer helath care under his socialized scheme than they do now.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1206149/STEPHEN-GLOVER-I-deeply-resent-Americans-sneering-health-service---thats-truth-hurts.html#I deeply resent the Americans sneering at our health service - but perhaps that's because the truth hurtsBy Stephen Glover
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1206149/STEPHEN-GLOVER-I-deeply-resent-Americans-sneering-health-service---thats-truth-hurts.html##ixzz0OH34dGQaPresident Barack Obama's political enemies are rounding on his controversial proposals to extend government involvement in health care. One way in which they are doing so is to hold up our own cherished NHS for ridicule.
His Right-wing critics accuse the NHS of putting an 'Orwellian' financial cap on the value of life by allowing elderly people to die without treatment.
The case of a dental patient in Liverpool who supposedly had to superglue a loose crown has been mentioned as an example of the appallingly low standard of dentistry in Britain.
At the wilder reaches of seemingly lunatic allegations is the suggestion that anyone over the age of 59 in Britain is ineligible for treatment for heart disease.
One leading Republican has also declared that the 77-year-old Senator Edward Kennedy, who is suffering from a brain tumour, would have been allowed to die in this country on account of his relatively advanced age.
In fact, President Obama's plans fall well short of the sort of state-run health service we have in this country. He wants to ensure that the 40 or 50 million Americans - many of them black or Latino - who do not have health insurance are able to receive the same standard of care as the majority who do.
Nevertheless, his proposals are characterised as 'socialist medicine', and the NHS is invoked as the living example of this abomination.
We may be sure, I think, that most of those who are cheerily dredging up British scare- stories do not really believe them.
We are merely providing the ballast in a domestic American argument that is getting dirty. Let's not take offence at this wildly overstated depiction of Britain as a sort of feral, failed state with Third World standards of health care.
The question that interests me is whether there is a grain of truth hiding amid these insults. I'd say there was. I'd say that under the present system which President Obama is hoping to improve, most middle-class Americans are liable to receive better health treatment than their British counterparts.
If I were a middle-income American living in Seattle or Chicago, I could almost certainly rely on superior care than if I lived in Birmingham or Newcastle.
This would probably not apply if I were poor, though there is a safety net for the sick and uninsured in the United States that is more effective than British critics commonly suppose. I accept, too, that American healthcare can be wasteful and unnecessarily extravagant. It suits vested interests to perpetuate this lavish system, which partly explains the attacks on President Obama.
Once, in America and suffering from bad earache, I visited a local doctor. In this country I would probably have been greeted with a weary smile, and, if lucky, offered an aspirin.
In the United States I was cosseted by a pretty nurse, and subjected to several exhaustive tests by an accommodating doctor, one of which involved me sitting in a sound-proof booth to have my hearing tested. At the end of it all I was presented with a bill for several hundred dollars - and the verdict that I had nothing to worry about.
But whatever the failings and excesses of the American system, the statistics suggest that it delivers better outcomes than the NHS when dealing with serious illnesses. I say 'suggest' because we should always be wary of comparing figures compiled in different ways in different countries.
In treating almost every cancer, America apparently does better than Britain, sometimes appreciably so. According to a study in Lancet Oncology last year, 91.9 per cent of American men with prostate cancer were still alive after five years, compared with only 51.1per cent in Britain.
The same publication suggests that 90.1 per cent of women in the U.S. diagnosed with breast cancer between 2000 and 2002 survived for at least five years, as against 77.8 per cent in Britain.
So it goes on. Overall the outcome for cancer patients is better in America than in this country. So, too, it is for victims of heart attacks, though the difference is less marked.
If you are suspicious of comparative statistics, consult any American who has encountered the NHS. Often they cannot believe what has happened to them - the squalor, and looming threat of MRSA; the long waiting lists, and especially the official target that patients in 'accident and emergency' should be expected to wait for no more than four - four! - hours; the sense exuded by some medical staff that they are doing you a favour by taking down your personal details.
Most Americans, let's face it, are used to much higher standards of healthcare than we enjoy, even after the doubling of the NHS budget under New Labour. Of course, the U.S. is a somewhat richer country, but I doubt its superior health service can be mainly attributed to this advantage.
Americans should beware of any proposals that might threaten their standards, though President Obama is right to want to extend them to the poor.
As for us, it is time we accepted that the NHS is not the envy of the world, if it ever was. Even though it may not deserve many of the brickbats being thrown at it by Right-wing American critics, the practice of rationing expensive cancer drugs and treatments is undoubtedly more widespread in Britain than it is in America.
The principle of equal healthcare for everyone regardless of income is a precious one. The fact is, though, that there are other, better ways to achieve this than through an increasingly inefficient, centrally planned leviathan set up over 60 years ago.
In our hearts many, perhaps most, of us know this. We all have horror stories to tell about the NHS, though we are likely to have good things to say about it, and its sometimes selfless medical staff, as well.
An increasing number of us take out private health insurance, and many others would like to do so if they could only afford to, which hardly indicates unbounded confidence in the NHS.
And yet, despite its shortcomings, we are reluctant to think about changing it, and any politician who suggested doing so might as well slit his own throat.
For all his admiration of the NHS as a result of the treatment it offered his severely disabled son, David Cameron is quite clever enough to recognise its deficiencies, but he will only dare talk about putting ever more money into it as it is. I doubt he will be any braver, or more imaginative, in government.
In view of the failure of President Bill Clinton's healthcare proposals more than 15 years ago, and the opposition he is now facing, the omens may not be good for Mr Obama.
If he really could preserve all that is good about the present U.S. system, while making it available to everyone regardless of income, I would wish him all the luck in the world.
The President is discovering that people are apt to want to defend and preserve what they have. The same is true of we British and our lumbering health service. The difference, though, is that what the Americans have is, for the most part, better than the NHS.
