Ryan hot air

I never know whether to laugh or cry when American politicians decide to take aim at the UK's National Health Service (NHS), that well-known spawn of a socialist Satan.  Remember Sarah Palin a couple of years ago?  According to her, any seriously ill patient's fate at the hands of the NHS was decided by a "death panel".  I tried to get on the death panel at our local hospital but was told there was a waiting list -- typical NHS.*  One has to suppose that the concept of triage is unknown in the US health care system, or at least unknown to Sarah Palin.

Then there was the British guy who got a lot of coverage from Rush Limbaugh and others of that ilk by claiming that he couldn't get dental care on the NHS, and was forced to fix his own teeth with superglue.  I'm sure Rush Limbaugh knows perfectly well that in the UK you can get to see a dentist remarkably quickly if you're prepared to pay for it.  Of course,  the existence of choice between public and private care (which exists in all fields of medical treatment in the UK,  not just dentistry) wouldn't fit the right-wing narrative,  so there was no point in Rush bringing it to the attention of the US audience.

Which brings us to Paul Ryan, newly-minted Republican vice-presidential candidate.  On almost his first day in the "job", Ryan launched a blistering attack on the NHS, arguing (or rather, asserting without evidence) that it caused the middle classes to become dependent on the state, and thereby made it almost impossible to cut public sector spending.  Much better, it seems, to allow tens of millions of people to live without protection against unexpected medical costs, and to hand the whole industry over to the benign forces of the private insurance sector, where every ailment can be waved aside as a "pre-existing condition".  

If the US wants to spend a higher proportion of its GDP on health care than any other nation in the world, while achieving key outcomes (infant mortality, overall life expectancy) no better than in many Third World countries, that's entirely the US's business.  But it really doesn't justify the misleading assertions and outright lies that US politicians regularly see fit to utter about medical care in the rest of the world.

* Unlike Sarah Palin, I'm joking.