NHS attacked by the vicious right in Obama’s health care battle

By Theo Blackwell

Britain’s Nation Health Service is currently under attack in the United States by the Republican and right-wing attack-dogs in their opposition to Obama’s health plans.

Practically every day the Obama healthcare reforms are debated, the reputation of one of the finest achievements this country has ever gained is undermined, besmirched and distorted as part of an aggressive campaign by Republicans and right-wing insurance industry lobbyists to block reform of America ‘s unequal healthcare system.

Of course, we’ve sent his before, with George Bush Senior’s memorable 1992 attack on ‘socialised medicine’ as having the compassion of the KGB, despite the obvious failings and inefficiency of the U.S. system. Worse still, this time the British Conservative Party is standing meekly by while one of their own – Daniel Hannan MEP – myth-peddles about our healthcare system.

A right-wing propaganda assault, funded by the private insurance lobby is being mobilised to defeat President Obama’s (by European standards) comparatively limited proposals to finally bring some healthcare coverage to the 46 million American citizens currently without cover. Sadly for uninsured Americans it seems to be having an effect, so far delaying the bill’s progress through Congress.

For the Conservatives for Patient Rights group, a body with links to the huge private insurance industry, Obama is criticised for the cost of universal health care coverage for all uninsured Americans. Americans for Limited Government, citing longstanding NHS critic Dr. Karol Sikora, undermines the NHS further in an extraordinary ‘Solyent Green’ rant. Attempts at ‘socialised’ medicine by Obama are compared, in more ways than one, to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Sikora’s intevention in the debate on U.S. networks speaks for itself.

Enter Conservative Dan Hannan MEP, forgetting the jolly hard fisking he got for claiming the NHS is “a mistake” in March this year. Last week he continued his attack on Fox News with this astonishingly ignorant statement:

“The most striking thing about it [the NHS] is that you are very often just sent back to the queue. You turn up with a complaint, with an ailment and you are told, “OK, how about October of next year” or whatever it is. And then you are not able to supplement your treatment, your state’s health care treatment with any private money of your own. People who had conditions and tried to buy drugs independently, they were told that the health treatment would be stopped.”

Come again?

Hannan says: “the most striking thing about it is that you are very often just sent back to the queue.” But show me a system where your needs aren’t assessed and prioritised? This happens in America, too – all the time if you have no insurance.

He continues: “You turn up with a complaint, with an ailment and you are told, “OK, how about October of next year” or whatever it is.” Hannan’s ‘Whatever it is’ is a maximum waiting time of 18 weeks and, in practice, an average of about 8.

He adds: “And then you are not able to supplement your treatment, your state’s health care treatment with any private money of your own.” That’s not true – you are.

He concludes: “People who had conditions and tried to buy drugs independently, they were told that the health treatment would be stopped.” This was once the case, but it is now prohibited.

Hannan also repeats the myth that the NHS is the “third largest employer in the world” after the Chinese Red Army and the Indian Railways (it’s not), a myth presumably supposed to conjure up mental images of inappropriate scale, disregard for human life or an overcrowded, creaking infrastructure.

At a speech to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, Hannan warmed to his own theme:

“Ponder our example, and tremble. You see a grizzly picture of your own country’s possible future…Do not make the same mistakes we have…I see this massive encroachment of the state…this huge power grab by the state machine… squeezing the private sector, to engorge the state…It is exactly a Marxist system. You are treated as a supplicant and expected to be grateful for what you get.”

In times like this you might expect some of the bodies representing NHS institutions – doctors, Primary Care Trusts, nurses – to defend their own reputation. Sadly, not a peep, and perhaps it is a dangerous strategy: every blow landed against the NHS emboldens the private healthcare insurance lobby jealously looking at how it can expand in the UK at the expense of the NHS.

So isn’t it time for the NHS, and Labour, to step up and defend the slurs and distortions on its performance and record by those with a clear political agenda? And if David Cameron really respects the NHS, what does he have to say about the statements I’ve outlined above by a recently re-elected member of his own party?