Posted: May 08, 2012 9:31 pm
nearestthingtonone wrote:It's one of these extremely dangerous "matters of principle", I think. People who are afraid of communism, for example, see universal healthcare as one step before complete forfeiture of all money to the government in exchange for some cheese - they don't look at it in the way I do, which is that me paying an extra twenty or thirty pounds a month in tax can be the difference between life and death for several people. But then, as I said at the beginning of this post, my cultural background has shown me how it can work. Many people, especially in America, have been subject to hideous propaganda about the state of hospitals in countries with universal healthcare, and how doctors are forced to work for nothing, and other utter fucking nonsense.
We had our own examples of this for a while. The VA hospitals had a terrible record for a long time. Some of the Department of Defense hospitals* have had a horrible track record recently. It has been a popular argument amongst conservatives using examples of those failures as what will become the norm if we allow government to play a bigger role.
They are ignoring the popularity and success in their own country of Medicare and the VA over the last decade let alone all of the other countries who have managed to get workable government system.
*Hopsitals such as Walter Reed are operated by a different body than the VA. The VA has really improved the last 2 decades yet people see problems with Army hospitals and do not recognize they are run by different agencies and wrongly blame the VA.