What do you think of this blog posting about the reactions of American rightwingers to the recent car bombing plots in Britain?

By the way, the British NHS is a monolithic state health service, while countries on the Continent tend to keep the actual provision of health care in private hands while having a state-run insurance provider.

No politician dares to reform the NHS, which is still run by its white-coated medical priesthood. Even Margaret Thatcher, who was fearless with terrorists, quailed before the doctors and nurses. "The NHS is safe in our hands," she said. But the question has long been: are we safe in the NHS's hands?

Aneurin Bevan, the man who created this monster, explained how he had persuaded the senior doctors to submit to the state: "I stuffed their mouths with gold." But training our own doctors is expensive. Today, the agencies that supply the NHS with doctors recruit their staff throughout Africa and Asia. Many are Muslims and, inevitably, some of them are Islamists.

The idea that the NHS is somehow responsible for the recent terror attempt is, as the people at the blog you referred me to, put it, "wingnuttery". I was particularly intrigued by two points made in the extended discussion: first, that homeschooling contributes to wingnuttery, which is part of why I feel that homeschooling should be forbidden, as being antisocial and subjecting children to brainwashing; and second, that a society with universal healthcare frees some people to follow their hearts as to career for not having to worry about healthcare for themselves or their children. It is practically a truism that people do best what they like best. And so society has much to gain by empowering people to work at what they like, as can be seen in the brilliant results, in written materials and murals, of the WPA during the Great Depression. One of Newark's high schools has WPA murals in its lobby, and I think the Airport also has some WPA murals.
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As for a British- or French-style universal healthcare system, I suspect that what we will ultimately get — hopefully sooner rather than later — is a mix of the two, in that, as I have often observed, the United States is a both-and kind of society, not either-or. So we will have BOTH public hospitals and clinics AND private practitioners paid from a single-payer fund.
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There was a minor overstatement in that blog's extended discussion, about Medicare, which suggested that wealthier Americans need to hide assets in order to qualify for Medicare. In actuality, this year, and for the first time ever, they will pay slitely more than poorer Americans, with the richest paying only 1.4 times as much as the poorest. Why the poor should have to pay anything is beyond me, and we may fix this when we institute universal coverage, hopefully very soon. It is worth noting, however, that we have HAD universal healthcare under a single-payer system for the ELDERLY for many years, and the Nation didn't collapse. The idea that rich elderly people were drawing on Government 'welfare' -- and thus driving up taxes for the poor and middle class, is shocking, because they are so keen on complaining about such things being Government welfare for the poor.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:05 AM