As Britain’s National Health Service approached its birthday, Daniel Hannan, a popular (within his party) Conservative appeared on Fox news and bemoaned the NHS as a 60 year long mistake:

(Skip to 5.38 for the worst of it, not for the faint of temper)

In the USA, “socialized medicine” is the label applied by Conservatives to scare people away from any form of publicly funded healthcare system. (Note that I use the American spelling in this context!) I’m not going to try to convince people that this is, in fact, an excellent system, but I want them to just entertain the idea from the point of view of Society instead of Politics. I haven’t seen the film Sicko, but I imagine Michael Moore covers most of the traditional arguments.

(Part 1) Understanding the resistance to Socialized Medicine

Many Americans believe that if you introduce a “socialist” medical system that the quality of healthcare will die out. Marketisation is so integral to the American way of life that the only way to ensure someone is giving you their best is to make the system unreliable. In fact, this just ensures that those that can afford it get the best medical care and those that can’t, should work harder so they can afford it.

They oppose systems like Medicare because they believe it affects the care they’re given. The fear is that if you introduce something as simple as the government paying the doctor instead of him “earning” his own pay checks, all doctors will start leaving scissors inside your grandmother because they don’t care anymore; their salary is secure as it is paid for by the government.

The other fear is that they are convinced that they’ll have to wait a few hours for treatment like in Canada, and nobody ever wants to be Canada.

The market is so important in the USA that the very mention of the word socialist suggests that Stalin is ready to pop out of the grave and stamp on your daughter’s pet rabbit, then steal a portion of carrot to give to the poorer rabbit across the street. The term, in American discourse, is a relic of the Cold War, and it still sounds like is has nuclear weapons aimed at the declaration of independence.

(Part 2) National Security: Fighting Terrorism and Pandemics

Imagine for a moment that the country has been attacked by a terrorist network which has released a highly contagious biological weapon in a train station. The subway is used by both poor and rich people, but because the location is underground it should be easy to quarantine. The scenario can also be applied to natural pandemics like Swine Flu which can be passed on through the air.

Given that healthcare is marketised, the rich get a good service and the poor get a bad service, which works on any normal day. The problem is that disease does not discriminate by wealth, so both poor and rich people have equal chance of becoming ill. The result is that the though the rich are able to cure themselves, the poor cannot because they are not seen to, and the rich are still at risk. It is in the interests of the rich to make sure the poor are healthy.

With an NHS, everybody receives some sort of basic, minimum treatment to vaccinate against the disease, and thus the spread can be stopped. It also makes certain that the state has a co-ordinated, organised, tried-and-tested procedure for dealing with large-scale emergencies, instead of one doctor and his private practice doing the best he can.

This also prevents private practices from hoarding resources that are desperately needed elsewhere, as the Ministry of Health will be in charge of allocating equipment, and even human resources.

In Britain, the NHS issued a leaflet to every household in the country explaining what Swine Flu is and what to do about it, and Health Secretary Andy Burnham has now told doctors they can diagnose patients on the spot instead of lab-testing. I hope the USA will realise that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.