Rose Cantine

It’s funny how American conservatives get all it all wrong about the British NHS or any other country’s “socialized” medicine. They’ve been calling it a disaster but it works quite well, as Stephen Amidon, an American writer living in Britain, recently wrote in Salon:

“This, I learned, is what the NHS is about — common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.”

I’ve lived in the Netherlands for over a decade, My health insurance is fairly inexpensive and I have no complaints. The Netherlands does not have a “public” option; all health insurance is carried out by private insurers, but they are subject to very strict rules. They can’t just throw you out, they have to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and they compete with one another. It’s a single payer system.

I recently moved to San Francisco temporarily for business and my monthly health insurance premium here is three times what it was in the Netherlands, the care is no better, the copayments are outrageous, the prescription drugs much more expensive. That means ordinary people are getting ripped off big time and the US government is supporting the rip-off. That people have to go bankrupt because they can’t pay for healthcare is nothing short of barbaric.

Unfortunately the same rip-off artists lobby our federal and state legislators to pass laws that keep this unjust system in place. And ordinary people just let this happen because they’ve got their own nice little healthcare package and they don’t care what happens to others. Until of course, they get laid off. Suddenly the world does not seem so sunny anymore.

I don’t think much will change in the US until the mentality changes from “I’ve got mine, screw you” (which has been the dominant ethos for decades in this country) to “We need to make sure we take care of each other.”