US Republicans tell lies about the NHS

[composerdoh]

btw, for those of you maybe from out of the US and may not know what they're talking about, Sarah Palin keeps saying that the government is going to create these "death panels" and that they're going to ration care, decide who lives and dies- she even suggested they would kill her baby.

In the clip I just posted, the guest calmly and rationally points out what the end of life care counseling really is, and even points out that most private insurance plans already have such provisions. (Including the health insurance provided by the show he's on.)

But shrill voices determined to make a fool of Obama, like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, have been adamantly insisting that this is in fact some sort of "death panel" that will pull the plug on the elderly.

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by Zeitblom

Not all die-hard Tories, apparently

LOL and how fast did Cameron move to bash him? He emailed his entire supporters' list!!

The British embassy in Washington has been instructed to counter the lies. Twitter crashed on Wednesday as thousands of ordinary Brits did the same. The Health Department's issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the Press Association. Republican lies about the NHS were the lead item on the BBC 'Today' programme this morning.

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by composerdoh

But shrill voices determined to make a fool of Obama, like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, have been adamantly insisting that this is in fact some sort of "death panel" that will pull the plug on the elderly.

It's ironic that the British Goverment has had huge amounts of stick lately for refusing to relax laws on assisting suicide. The idea that elderly people are left to rot, or craftily disposed of, couldn't be farther from the truth.

Wonderful posts on this thread, especially from composerdoh (thanks for the links). I am still dumbfounded about the whole thing.

One overriding thought strikes me, though. If we are incensed by this, how must the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of NHS workers feel? A great many people work enormously hard in the NHS for not a lot of money because they care about others and have a strong sense of social duty. To brand them as some sort of extermination squad is jaw-droppingly insulting.

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by Chilperich

Off-topic trivia note: Michele Hanson, before she became a journalist, was a professional musician. When I was a teenager, she started to teach me flute (before I concluded that I wasn't really cut out for it), and very kindly continued to teach me piano thereafter (she introduced me to Bela Bartok's Mikrokosmos).

She was a very good musician and teacher, and a very nice lady. She used to let me practise on the harpsichord she kept in her flat in Addison Road, Kensington. One day I answered the door to one of her advanced flute students: it was the session-man Dick Parry (who played sax on "Us And Them" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon!).

Well! I never knew that.

Perhaps we can get her to join BC.

[Zeitblom]

Originally Posted by Florestan

One overriding thought strikes me, though. If we are incensed by this, how must the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of NHS workers feel? A great many people work enormously hard in the NHS for not a lot of money because they care about others and have a strong sense of social duty. To brand them as some sort of extermination squad is jaw-droppingly insulting.

I agree. But it's not that much worse than the daily diet of abuse that they - and other public-sector employees like teachers and social workers - get from the hard-Right tabloids in this country.

And, as I said at the top of the thread, let's not forget that Cameron and Osborne keep telling them that their pensions are unaffordable.

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by Chilperich

I think that the US urgently needs a proper universal system of socialised medicine, but I would not propose the NHS of today as a model, with its management-heavy structure, professionalisation of nursing, internal market, PFI hospitals, etc.

You have to go back to the NHS of the 50s, 60s and 70s to see how such a system should work.

I was thinking about this last night. If you were building a health service from the ground up, you (obviously) wouldn't have the cumbersome physical infrastructure that the NHS has to deal with. It means you could radically rethink the organisational structure to maximise efficiency while giving employees ethical pay and conditions, deploy state of the art technology and also make sustainability central to the whole endeavour.

Sadly, that is not what Obama is proposing, but it would certainly be an exciting prospect

[Zeitblom]

Here's a little bit of video about the foundation of the NHS. Some of it is quite pertinent to this debate:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCrHlAemaFw"]YouTube - NHS - Marr's Modern Britain[/ame]

[Philidor]

Fabulous. I love the Elgar-type music swelling in the background. I'm reading Michael Foot's 'Aneurin Bevan' atm. He reports Bevan describing himself as: 'Not a politician but a projectile launched from the Welsh valleys.'



Aneurin Bevan at the Park Hospital in Manchester (5th July 1948)



Sylvia Diggory, the first NHS Patient

[composerdoh]

idk if I posted this before- it wasn't available as a clip b4- only the whole episode. Either way, it's a great clip:


http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/th...ck-s-operation

[Philidor]

I take it Glenn Beck isn't a raving socialist?