Britain’s health care service says it is sick of being lied about.
Pilloried by right-wing critics of US President Barack Obama’s health care plan, Britain’s National Health Service, known as the NHS, is fighting back.
“People have been saying some untruths in the States,” a spokesman for Britain Department of Health said in a telephone interview. “There’s been all these ridiculous claims made by the American health lobby about Obama’s health care plan ... and they’ve used the NHS as an example. A lot of it has been untrue.”
He spoke anonymously in line with department policy.
A particularly outlandish example of a US editorial, printed in the Investor’s Business Daily, claimed that renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who is disabled, “wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” Hawking, who was born and lives in Britain, personally debunked the claim.
“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told the Guardian newspaper.
Investor’s Business Daily has since corrected the editorial.
As the debate over how best to look after US patients rages on, Britain’s socialized health care system has increasingly found itself being drawn into the argument. Critics of the Obama administration’s plan to overhaul US health care say the president is seeking to model the US system on that of Britain or Canada — places they paint as countries where patients linger for months on waiting lists and are forbidden from paying for their own medication.
A Republican National Committee ad said that in the UK “individuals lose their right to make their own health care choices.” Another ad launched earlier this month by the anti-tax group Club for Growth claimed that government bureaucrats in Britain had calculated six months of life to be worth US$22,750.
“Under their socialized system, if your treatment costs more, you’re out of luck,” the ad says, as footage of an elderly man weeping at a woman’s bedside alternate with clips of the Union Jack and Big Ben.
The online attacks on Britain’s health care system have been paired with strident criticism from Republican lawmakers.
In an interview widely interpreted as an attack on the UK, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told a local radio station last week that “countries that have government-run health care” would not have given Senator Edward Kennedy, who suffers from a brain tumor, the same standard of care as in the US because he is too old. Another Republican, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia, said that the UK and Canada “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently.”
The criticism, widely covered in the UK media, has clearly stung Britain’s left-leaning Labour government. The Department of Health took the unusual step of contacting The Associated Press and e-mailing it a three-page rebuttal to what it said were misconceptions about the NHS being bandied about in the US media — each one followed with the words: “Not true.”
At the top of the list was the idea that a patient in his late 70s would not be treated for a brain tumor because he was too old — a transparent reference to Grassley’s comments about Kennedy.
And what of Republicans’ claim that British patients are robbed of their medical choices? False again, the department said.
“Everyone who is cared for by the NHS in England has formal rights to make choices about the service that they receive,” it said in its rebuttal.
Then followed a fact sheet comparing selected statistics such as health spending per capita, infant mortality, life expectancy and more. Each one showed England outperforming its trans-Atlantic counterpart.
The British government offers health care for free at the point of need, a service pioneered by Labour in 1948. In the six decades since, its promise of universal medical care, from cradle to grave, is taken for granted by Britons to such an extent that politicians — even fiscal conservatives — are loath to attack it.
But the NHS faces significant challenges, not least a multibillion dollar deficit predicted to open up over the next five years. It has its critics, too, particularly cancer patients who complain that the government refuses to cover costlier drugs, leaving those who need expensive treatments to pay for them out of pocket.
Nevertheless, many in the British press bristled at the criticism from the US right wing.
“How dare the Republicans bad-mouth our free health care system?” Guardian columnist Michele Hanson wrote Wednesday. “If I’d been born in the US, I’d probably be dead by now.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS