Conservatives for Socialized Medicine
Royal Gwent Hospital (NHS Photo)
One thing I always wonder about critics of government involvement in health care is how is it that the British system is so terrible, nobody seems to have told the UK’s population? Here, for example, is the Conservative Party’s policy statement on the National Health Service:
In its bricks and mortar, people and services, the NHS embodies something which is truly great about Britain. That something is equity: the spirit of fairness for all and the equal right of everyone regardless of age, background or circumstance to get the healthcare they need.
It really is one of the most precious gifts we enjoy as British citizens, providing a lifeline to families up and down the country. That is why the Conservative Party has made the NHS its number one priority. We back it, and want to built it and improve it for everyone. [...]
This document sets out the Conservative Party’s plan to renew our bureaucratised NHS. At its heart is an unambiguous commitment to give the NHS the funding it needs. [...]
We should be proud that, in its sixtieth year, people are beginning to look at the Conservative Party as the party of the NHS. But we’ve got to live up to that honour.
They love socialism! And surely it’s not because nobody in the Party of Thatcher is familiar with the right-wing critique of this model of health care. Nor is it because nobody in the Party of Thatcher believes in the standard right-wing critique of the model. But to the people who actually pay the taxes to finance the NHS and receive the services provided by the NHS, talk of dismantling it and moving to the glories of free market medicine is so politically toxic that even the right-of-center party banishes any such talk. Instead, they promise more money and “establishing an independent board to run our NHS” so that “we can take politicians out of its day-to-day management.”
35 Responses to “Conservatives for Socialized Medicine”
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June 12th, 2009 at 10:58 am
No politician here would ever dare even hint at eliminating – or even reducing the scope of the NHS. Our care, it has to be said, isn’t perfect and there IS more rationing than I would ideally like to see. BUT – the UK pays about half what the US pays per percent of GDP on healthcare, and for that manages to cover the entire population and to achieve statistically better health outcomes than the US.
I wrote about this subject on my own blog today.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Matthew is surely right that the Tories are making an accommodation from their normal free market tendencies in order to support socialized medicine because of political realities. It is really no different than the major Democrats in the US who are failing to support single payer health care because “talk of [single payer] is so politically toxic that even the [left]-of-center party banishes any such talk.” Political parties in all countries deal with the political climate that have, and not the political climate they might wish to have.
I note that this conservative is in favor of socialized medicine also. But only so long as we pay for it the same amount that the Brits pay for theirs. But since I don’t see any proposals on the table to reduce our national health spending by half(?), I’m not sure where that gets us.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:05 am
If you eliminate the words “which is truly great about Britain”, it would read like a complaint by an American conservative.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Woo Hoo Matty! Off topic but here’s yet more proof of ObaFuhrer’s beneficent nimbus spreading across the MidEast.
Surely you’ll give him credit for this prominent political assassination, yes?
As to your argument that Britain’s Nanny State medical system MUST be good because of the support it receives across the pander spectrum well that’s just another of your insane and poorly thought out farts.
Are you incapable of thinking of any American programs which, in the cold light of June 2009, would never be adopted but which are in fact so ingrained in American life as to make their demise unthinkable?
Gee, I bet you can!
Didn’t you just say yesterday as how the tax exemption for health benefits was one such program?
The more you go on making your thoughtless when not idiotic pronouncements the more convinced I become that you must be a gang of stupid hacks holed up in a dank basement at ObaFuhrer ThunkenGroupen.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:07 am
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?hp
Careless me!
June 12th, 2009 at 11:07 am
But since I don’t see any proposals on the table to reduce our national health spending by half(?), I’m not sure where that gets us.
This is the problem, isn’t it. Obviously if we could just import Britain’s health care it seems like that would be a good thing. I guess the major issue is that we spend such a tremendous amount to keep terminally ill people alive an extra week or two, and no politician wants to actually point that out.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:15 am
It is not politically toxic. It is a campaign fund desicant.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:16 am
S
There is only one “government-run” health system in the US, and it’s the VA System. Medicare is a government-run insurance product.
So, the same way that when you have insurance from Blue Cross you’re not in a “Blue Cross-run health system,” when you have insurance paid for by the government, you’re not in a government-run health system.
There’s only ONE government-run health system in the United States. It’s the VA system.
The problem isn’t that they’re blinded by ideology. It’s that they’re ignorant about what’s going on, so they just repeat talking points written by pollsters and special interests. This is how so many simultaneously oppose “socialized medicine” while supporting the only form of socialized medicine in the United States.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:24 am
It is not politically toxic. It is a campaign fund desicant.
A distinction without a difference under our political system.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:27 am
of course what Al leavrs out of his little discussion of political reality is that the political “toxicity” of single payer in the US (which, BTW, is probably much higher among Villagers and our ruling oligarchs than among the general populace, especially when it is accurately explained) is that this has resulted from over seven decades of demonization by the Republicans, the AMA, and their allies with virtually no pushback from the MSM or political leaders. Nonetheless, there is such widespread dissatisfaction with our current private health care system that even the demonizers claim to suppport reform (if in name only). However, the widespread support for single payer in the UK (though I am sure they have their gripes and complaints like everyone else) has resulted from 60 years of actual experience with the system. Exactly the same experience that the Rethugs are scared to death to give Americans via any public option.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:27 am
As a liberal (more or less) who’s experienced the NHS at direct and painful firsthand, I can only say, Don’t believe a friggin’ word of it. The NHS is a political shibboleth that noone is allowed to diminish – but it sucks, enormously, and (provided you dont suggest doing away with it), everyone you talk to in the UK will admit it & admit it needs an enormous amount of ‘reform’.
But the biggest problem isnt queueing (indeed, 75% of queueing there could be eliminated with a single speedy action*), its about standards of care. You would – literally! – scream murder and other words, at the care you were given in NHS hospitals … from simple things like having a 4 inch gash in your hand sutured without anaesthetic, to (at its worst) the more complex and lethal creep of necrotising fasciitis & MRSA due to a total inattention to cleanliness.
None of this, of course, makes it into comparative health figures
Oh, and I’m not trying to defend the current appalling US system of health by job lottery, guaranteed to produce a permanent underclass: I’m just saying, what you think you see, isn’t what is actually there, in this case.
*The action? charge a (small) fee to see GPs (family doctors) – because visiting them is free, there is a permanent standing queue to see any doctor, between the hypochondriacs, the overanxious, and the elderly/infirm who seem to regard it as a good excuse for a day out (or possibly a nice warm place to sit for the day & see your friends, I’m not sure).
The result of this is looong delays in meeting appointment times, which in turn adds enormously to delays, frustration, and people choosing not to seek initial assessments (and all the consequent evils of unmedicated problems).
June 12th, 2009 at 11:29 am
As I recall, the U.S. consistently lags most other developed countries when it comes to polls about their respective health care systems. So, this is pretty clearly a case of strong status quo bias, and it is why a public option is crucial.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:37 am
“even the right-of-center party banishes any such talk.”
Part of the reason why is that David Cameron made frequent use of the NHS whilst caring for his disabled son (who died earlier this year). Honestly, go read anything Cameron has said about his son Ivan and how completely his experiences with NHS doctors and nurses reinforced his commitment to and admiration for the system.
Have to say, there is something quite remarkable to see a quintessential, blue-blooded leader of the Conservative Party make the most impassioned speeches in praise of the NHS. Don’t think there is a better advocate for healthcare reform out there, Obama could do a whole lot worse than looking for Cameron for cues.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Al and Adam,
In response to Al’s comment that, “since I don’t see any proposals on the table to reduce our national health spending by half(?), I’m not sure where that gets us.”, I say this:
Increased government role (like an expanded medicare-like program for people under 65)is how we will get UK-like costs.
We need to make a sharp distinction between expanding the government role in healthcare, and expanding healthcare access to everyone. The latter will cost more money, but if we expand government’s role, we can dent, or even suppress, this increase.
It is not an accident that in recent years the government-run NHS has spent less than half of what the US spends per capita on healthcare (in PPP dollars), and that healthcare spending in the UK is less than half that of US as a % of GDP (Check this study out: content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/3/10).
Government-involvement, primarily through greater bargaining power, can reduce healthcare costs. This is what has happened in the UK and other advanced economies, and what would probably happen with a public plan option in the US if reason prevails on cap hill.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:52 am
The NHS is absolutely appalling in terms of levels of comfort and customer service – frankly they don’t give a shit. Fortunately, neither do I. When I go to a doctor I want effective treatment, which the NHS are very good at, not flowers and servile fawning, which I really don’t want to pay for, directly or by taxation. In the UK, private medicine doesn’t even try to compete when it comes to the serious stuff, and when they mess up a nose job, hip relacement one of the other simple operations they do provide, they always run to the NHS to sort it out.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:58 am
But Matt, as you have pointed out elsewhere, in fact U.S. conservatives also agree on the implied factual statement: U.S. conservative criticize govt funded healthcare because it works (see, the poor private insurers can’t possibly compete!), and UK conservative praise it for the same reason.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Firefall, I wish I know what you were describing, but it isn’t the NHS of my experience. My husband and I have lived in the UK (London and Oxford) for the last three years and have nothing but praise for the system. And yes, that comes from first-hand experience. Even – gasp – a 6 inch gash to my husband’s forehead that occurred in a cycling accident after we’d been here for all of two weeks. He was immediately taken to hospital, treated and released in 2 hours (not great, but certainly no less for non-life threatening emergency care in most parts of the US). The treating physician couldn’t have been more professional, and – the best part – on leaving, we were not asked for a billing address, copay, insurance information, etc. In fact, we literally *walked out*. Talk about quality of care.
Yes, many facilities are not up to the superficial standards of those in America, but then, how much are you really willing to pay for 6 subscriptions to Newsweek and a fresh bouquet of flowers in the waiting room? In fact, our GP (in a mixed-income area of London) just moved to a new state of the art office which is indistinguishable to (if not better than) our former American GP’s in nearly every way. Several weeks ago I endured a few days of what turned out to be a terribly arduous sinus infection. I went to my GP without an appointment at 8am, was seen by 9, and had antibiotics by 9:30 (at a prescription fee of £7).
Not bad.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Njorl — “(Single-payer) is not politically toxic. It is a campaign fund desiccant.”
Al — “A distinction without a difference under our political system.”
Al, unfortunately, hit the nail on the head there.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
“The NHS is a political shibboleth that noone is allowed to diminish – but it sucks, enormously, and (provided you dont suggest doing away with it), everyone you talk to in the UK will admit it & admit it needs an enormous amount of ‘reform’.”
So politicians praise and defend the NHS, because if they didn’t they would suffer political consequences at the hands of the voters, who hate the NHS? Talk me through that one.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Outside of American ads lobbying against socialized healthcare, it’s hard to find a Canadian who objects to it either. Yes, there’s a reform movement advocating for relatively minor changes like user fees or a parallel private system (which we already have, to a limited degree), but I’ve never met another Canadian who wants to go back to privately run healthcare for the bulk of our services. Not one.
Matter of fact, one of the cheap (but effective) shots Liberals like to take at Conservatives here is accusing them of lusting for “American-Style” healthcare. Which, around here, is approximately analogous to accusing them of pedophilia.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
“So politicians praise and defend the NHS, because if they didn’t they would suffer political consequences at the hands of the voters, who hate the NHS? Talk me through that one.”
Clap clap clap. Superior.
I disagree totally with firewall’s assessment of WHERE the problems in the NHS system come in – I have never had any problem getting in to see a GP at any point. In fact, I have always been able to get a same day appointment with my GP’s practice any time I wanted one and have never waited very long once there. The problems with the NHS come when your GP identifies the need for further treatment/tests/specialist advice – when there can often be long waits for these services.
And public satisfaction with healthcare in the US is far higher than in the US. Voters here don’t want the NHS abolished or de-funded. They WOULD like more and better services, but they are reluctant to pay more in taxes for it.
I personally don’t think the all-government-run healthcare system is a particularly good model to follow (there are plenty of ways you could add more market incentives into the system to improve overall quality) but it’s FAR better than the US alternative in the minds of Britons. And, ironically, it is because most Britons have a better familiarity with the US system, which they find disgraceful, than with Continental European systems that seem to deliver better value, that there isn’t more of an outcry for real reform here.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
MY Re: The Tories “They love socialism!”
Too funny.
Can you imagine, in ten years time, a conservative southern Senator discussing the need to gently tweak certain aspects of the Nation’s single-payer health care system for overall maximization?
I can’t.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Then again, if I am not mistaken, the Labour Party spent a good chunk of the last 8 years trying to infuse competition and free market principles into public services which I presume includes the NHS.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
# 17 Sam wrote re UK medical care:
Compare this anecdote to one described by Jay Leno recently when he spoke of a friend who had broken an arm in a motorcycle accident, went to Emergency for treatment and later received a bill for $27,000 for that treatment.
June 12th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Apparently, people in the U.K. don’t “need” to get effective cancer treatments, effective relative to other nations:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560849/UK-cancer-
survival-rate-lowest-in-Europe.html
Look, the U.S. system can’t really be defended, except on the grounds that it effectively gives huge incentives for private capital to be channeled for purposes of technology innovation, and that does indeed result in a faster pace of development for life saving tools, tools which benefit people all over the world. No, all that capital is not used to buy t.v. ads, as much some people like to think otherwise.
However, the degree to which people insist on deluding themselves, to the point, like in a comment above, that they claim that the only areas in which the NHS may fall short, compared to U.S. health care, is in magazines and fresh flowers in waiting rooms, is truly remarkable.
June 12th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I’ll try again
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560849/UK-cancer-survival-rate-lowest-in-Europe.html
June 12th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
And, ironically, it is because most Britons have a better familiarity with the US system, which they find disgraceful,
When travel insurance policies for the US offer $10m of emergency cover per person, it sort of drives the point home. The right-wing American view of healthcare as privilege is a learned cruelty.
June 12th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
anon wrote (#8): “when you have insurance from Blue Cross you’re not in a Blue Cross-run health system”
Some people would disagree, especially those who have had a doctor explain which treatment options are not covered by Blue Cross. It would be good for a public plan if it could claim that this aspect would not transfer over from the private plans; but could it truthfully claim that?
June 12th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
IIRC, the basic idea behind a European conservative party is to promote the status quo, whatever that is current seen as being. So, if the voters are by-and-large accustomed to the NHS, the Tories aren’t going to rock the boat much.
An American conservative isn’t “conservative” with respect to the status quo of the late 20th century, but to the status quo of the 1880s. Ergo, the GOP’s attempts to privatize Medicare and trim the VA over the years… except when they thought bribing the AARP with cheap drugs would buy them some votes in 2004.
If/when we have national health insurance or an NHS, you can count on the GOP making it their business to get rid of it.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
“Matthew is surely right that the Tories are making an accommodation from their normal free market tendencies in order to support socialized medicine because of political realities. It is really no different than the major Democrats in the US who are failing to support single payer health care because “talk of [single payer] is so politically toxic that even the [left]-of-center party banishes any such talk.” Political parties in all countries deal with the political climate that have, and not the political climate they might wish to have.”
This is a jumping of the shark. Single payer is VERY popular here amongst the public, but not amongst the entrenched insurance industry. Different reasons there.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:23 am
Now that’s a right-of-center party I can believe in!
June 13th, 2009 at 8:14 am
No, the ‘Conservative’ party – particularly after being opposition for a decade – doesn’t stand for the status quo. Its name comes from the 19th century when it was against the Whigs and Radicals. Traditionally it represented property, capital, authority and nobility. In the 1980’s a quasi-Reaganite ‘free enterprise’ element was added. These days they are trying to recast themselves as quasi-libertarian but no-one believes it very much.
In regard to healthcare the Conservatives have been known to favour make it easier for people to pay extra to get better treatment in NHS institutions – integrating a ‘private’ component into the public sytem. But they get nowhere politically because the attitude of the British public is generally that no-one should get better healthcare than anyone else in hospitals or surgeries. It is called ‘two-tier health care’. Equal healthcare is as much an expectation as equal justice, or even more so.
Health-socialism is not just a question of class or wealth – there is also a public scandal when it is revealed that the NHS in one part of the country is slightly better at treating this or that illness than another part. It is then called a ‘postcode lottery’. The ‘NHS reforms’ which tried to introduce corporate accounting and management techniques, and even competition, have not helped – in practice they seem to be a particularly opaque and non-accountable way of managing a lack of money.
The money spent on the NHS is actually not much compared to other European countries. One could easily increase by 20 percent and it would still not be at all expensive. (Which would require long-term tax increases, of course.)
June 13th, 2009 at 11:28 am
[...] was thinking some more about yesterday’s post on the UK Conservative Party’s paen to government-run health care, and it brought to mind an [...]
June 13th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
stringph – Actually, I think cmholm has a point here. The Tory defense of tradition has historically been extremely malleable – witness Robert Peel, Disraeli’s Red Toryism, Churchill’s acceptance of the post-1945 welfare state – in which long-view, a Thatcherite attempt at roll-back seems an exception.
Whereas modern American conservativism has genuinely tried to roll back social reforms, even if it hasn’t been successful. Taft-Hartley is a good example, we know that many Goldwaterians were furious with Eisenhower for blocking any privatization of Social Security, Goldwater himself wanted to scrap the whole thing although he didn’t win, Reagan dismantled a huge amount of Great Society programs and greatly weakened the progressive income tax and took a whack at Social Security (failed obviously).
The point is that while Republicans haven’t been always been more successful, it’s more their style than it is the Tory’s.
June 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Re: The point is that while Republicans haven’t been always been more successful, it’s more their style than it is the Tory’s.
But let’s not forget that the Tories, under Mrs Thatcher, did urn back the clock on unionism in Great Britain, just as Reagan did in the US. Th British working class has been just as shafted over the last generation as their American counterparts.