I would like to add my support and best wishes to Pat.
There were three doctors in my family during my father’s generation, two professors of medicine and a GP. They all said exactly the same thing: you would not have wanted to be poor and ill before the NHS.
The GP wrote two books about his experiences as a doctor and his childhood memories of his village schoolmaster father struggling to meet the ongoing cost of TB care for the children’s dying mother. His career started off in 1929 when he had to buy his way in installments into a small town practice. He wrote about the tragedy he witnessed of children and young adults dying of diseases which we can routinely treat today: scarlet fever, polio, diptheria, pneumonia etc; the arguments among his colleagues when the drugs did become available, about prescribing those expensive new drugs to patients who couldn’t afford to pay, the sacrifices made by families so that they could pay their doctors’ bills, the colliery accidents he attended and the victims who couldn’t work because of their injuries and their families determination to pay for their treatment somehow, and the relief when treatment became free to all with the NHS in 1948.
We have forgotten all this because we have been lucky enough not to have experienced it.
Even forgetting that the Yanks are adamant that they see the ability to go around shooting one another as a constitutional right, without that I still think they are completely out of their tree with all the objection to Obama’s attempt to provide health care. Basically it is simply because the richer ones don’t like the idea of having to pay towards someone else’s treatment.
Completely Bonkers.