Healthcare Reform.

Over the past few weeks America has been up in arms in opposition to President Obama's plan to reform the health care system. The fact that these protests seem to have focused more on people shouting for the sake of shouting then a debate over health care have led many people to think that the protests have nothing to do with health care reform. Instead they seem to be an expression of the general rage felt over the recession possibly fueled by July's arrest of a New Jersey Jewish crime syndicate. One significant recipient of this so called Kosher Nostra is believed to be a major contributor to Israel's ruling Likud party who also helps fund ultra-orthodox Jews trying to illegally settle the Palestinian West Bank. Within Israel these arrests are being seen as a direct attack by Obama on the Israeli government and their illegal settlement program and the Israeli's and the American Israeli lobby are said to be livid at the move.

Jewish conspiracy theories aside one of the more bizarre aspects of America's health care debate have been attempts by various commentators, pressure groups and even the odd British Conservative MEP to compare the proposed reforms to setting up an equivalent of the British National Health Service (NHS). According to these commentators the NHS is a barbaric system where patients are routinely denied treatments that could save their lives, wait for months for substandard treatment in filthy wards and ultimately have to face a death panel of bureaucrats who decide who is allowed to live and who must die. Despite being far too silly to take seriously these ludicrous claims have started something of a heated debate within Britain itself with the Twitterati leaping to the NHS's defence and forcing the leaders of all the three main political parties to heap praise on the institution.

If nothing else this debate proves just how seriously British voters take the NHS and how proud of it they are. I have to say that I agree with them because my maternal grandfather and grandmother as a doctor and hospital pharmacist respectively were part of the generation that built the NHS. Since then at least one member of my family has worked within the NHS so the history of the NHS is pretty much the history of my family making the institution a rather confusing metaphor for me.

When the idea of the NHS was first conceived at the end of the second world war it was said to be impossible. It was said there simply wasn't the money available because Britain, having just emerged from six years of war, was so heavily in debt that food was still on the ration, everything we manufactured had to be sold on export and the only thing staving off bankruptcy was that the newly liberated Europe owed us a favour. Despite all this people, like my grandparents, decided that they'd had enough of watching the old, the young and the poor die from simply not being able to afford treatment and pressed ahead despite the nay-sayers. This tenacity left Britain with a world class health care system and where Britain led the world followed. Over the next thirty years the system worked incredibly well providing first rate health care along with dental care, optical care, mental health care and social care all free at the point of need. Then in 1979 Britain made a terrible mistake and elected Margret Thatcher as Prime Minister. Thatcher hated the NHS as much as she hated reality itself and set about destroying the NHS so it could be replaced with a privatised system. She mainly did this by introducing the Health care Trust system that forced hospitals to operate as separate entities independent of each other and the Internal Market which, for no good reason, forced all the different departments within a hospital like radiology, patient transport and the cleaners to act as independent entities that had to bill each other for their services using pretend money. At the same time as turning the NHS into a bureaucratic nightmare Thatcher also deregulated the private health insurance industry. The idea was that once the NHS began to collapse under the weight of needless bureaucracy it would become unusable and those who could afford to would take shelter in private health insurance privatising the health care system by stealth. In the end Thatcher's own party realised that she was quite, quite mad and forced her out of office although the NHS has never quite recovered since.

Getting members of the British Conservative party to compare Obama's health care reforms to the NHS helps the British Establishment in two main ways. Firstly it makes Obama's life very difficult because proud as I am of the NHS it is a shadow of it's former self and not the shining example it should be. Secondly it reminds the British voting public of the damage that the Conservative party have done to the NHS. This will play particularly badly with a key demographic Conservative pollsters have dubbed "Holby City Women". This group are single, often gay, females aged 30-55 who work in the NHS. They are pretty well represented by characters in the BBC1 Soap Opera that gives them their name, Holby City, and much as they are sick of Gordon Brown's Labour party they will find it hard to vote Conservative. A reminder of how much of a threat the Conservatives are to the NHS should be enough to get this group to vote for the Liberal Democrats forcing a hung Parliament and a coalition government. The hope is that this will be enough to draw a veil of credibility over what will be a puppet regime.

The reasons why the British state feels the need to interfere with American health care are manifold. It's partly a colonial hangover, the Israel situation is a factor and as anyone who has had the displeasure of, Royal Consort, Prince Phillip's company knows that some of it is just good old fashioned racism. The main reason though stems from the terrible time the British Army are currently having in Afghanistan. Since being forced to commit more troops at the NATO Summit in April the British Military seem to be doing everything in their power to antagonise the Americans in the hope that the Americans will get sick of them and allow Britain to withdraw from a war it was so desperate to start. Plus imagine how humiliating it will be for Britain if America is able to exit the current recession introducing universal health care while Britain exits much later being forced to do away with universal health care.

Of course none of this has anything to do with Obama's health care reforms because he's not trying to copy the NHS. If he's trying to copy any countries health care system it's France's which despite being French is widely recognised as the best healthcare system in the world. The French system is essentially a privatised one much like the current American one. The key difference is that in France the government contributes, I believe, around 30% of the cost of insurance/treatment and in extreme circumstances acts as the insurer of last resort.

In a way this already happens in America with taxpayer funded programs like Medicare and Medicaid picking up the slack for people who can't afford health insurance and senior citizens who get health insurance. The problem is that these programs are run more like a slushfund then an insurance program so taxpayers money goes in and then taxpayers money flows straight back out again in a massive loss making operation. As a result these programs will go bankrupt between 2018 and 2030 and will need replacing. Although I haven't had time to read Obama's plan in full I personally think that it would be very prudent to replace these Medicaid programs with a public insurer of last resort.