15 August 2009

An American NHS Would Mean A Cut In Their Tax Bill AND Better Healthcare.

Amazingly, the American taxpayer pays MORE than the UK taxpayer does for state funded healthcare.

Americans spend around 15% of GDP on health in total - $2.2 trillion (about 7.5% of GDP is spent by US taxpayers ($1.1 trillion).

In comparison, UK taxpayers now spend around 8% of UK GDP on health ($155 billion).

This works out as $3,200 per capita in England, and $3,700 per capita in the US. In England this provides 100% of the population with care, while only 28% of US citizens are provided with care.

This is a US rip off healthcare scam, thank heaven for the NHS over here.

We can see why Republicans funded by health insurance companies are being so hysterical - they would lose a lot of money if the US had an NHS because it is clearly far more efficient and less bureaucratic than having to access EVERY single claimant and decide a premium (or deny them care altogether as often happnes in the US).

Of course the ironic thing is that President Obama is not (sadly) even proposing an NHS, just providing direct government insurance for the 50m Americans currently uninsured. This is enough though to elicit the following lies:-

"NHS breeds terrorists" screams FOX (ironically the SUN has now called for Americans to stop their 'vicious slurs' on the NHS - if only they would tell their owner Murdoch, who of course also owns Fox).

"Death panels" screams Palin and NHS is 'Evil and Orwellian' when precisely the opposite is true - unless you are fabulously wealthy most Americans cannot access care when they really need it. Those in real need are denied insurance - there is no more a 'death panel' than that.

"Nobody over 59 would get healthcare" - laughable!

"Stephen Hawking would be dead under the NHS". Hawking was surprised to hear this, as he has lived his whole life in the UK using the NHS.

These outrageous lies have finally caught up with the Tories over here who spout them, if not yet the Republicans - whose hysterical campaign is sadly having some success despite 20,000 twitter users defending the NHS.

2 comments:

  1. Sorry, you are still missing the point.

    There are two completely separate issues:

    1. How it should be funded (choose your own mix of taxpayer funding, private insurance and private cash payments).

    2. Who should provide healthcare (a state monopoly or competing providers).

    Please do not forget that 'competing providers' does not automatically mean some evil multi-national corporation. In Germany, for example, hospitals and clinics are owned by a mix of insurance companies, pension funds, trade unions, local councils, universities, churches and charities; as well as privately owned by doctors or partnerships thereof, as well as the odd evil multi-national corporation.

    As a final point, the US system is shit as well. But so what? So is the system in Zimbabwe. We should be looking to learn from countries who do things better than we do, not pointing at countries that do them worse.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark, Germany does have a better system than us - but they also spend more about 11% of GDP compared to 8% in the UK.

    ReplyDelete

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