Marathon Pundit: Brits get defensive about their version of ObamaCare

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Brits get defensive about their version of ObamaCare

Ten years ago a great aunt of mine died. She was quite the eccentric, and yes, you could say she was the proverbial crazy aunt in the basement. And our family, in that caustic Irish manner, never tired of making jokes at her expense.

She died without a will, and when I received a letter explaining I was one of many beneficiaries of her meager estate, I called my uncle--from the other side of my family--and asked him how I should proceed. Oh, he's the kindest of gentlemen, by the way.

When I told him the amount of the estate, he replied, "Wow, that's not of much of an accomplishment for a lifetime of work."

What did I do? The natural thing: I immediately jumped to her defense.

And that is what Britons are doing while Americans point out the flaws of their National Health Service, the United Kingdom's government-run health care agency, reflexifely defending it.

They're defending their crazy aunt from the attacks of outsiders.

Some of those attacks aren't true, as the Telegraph points out.

But the outrageous attacks aren't just coming from this side of the Atlantic.

"How dare the Republicans bad-mouth our free health care system?" Guardian columnist Michele Hanson wrote Wednesday. "If I'd been born in the U.S., I'd probably be dead by now."

The Guardian, a left-wing paper, collected Twitter defenses of the NHS.

But here's another attack on the NHS, and it doesn't come from me or a chain e-mail, but from a British paper, the Daily Mail, which says that critics claim that the NHS has become a "bureaucratic black hole."

Spending on NHS bureaucracy has almost doubled in four years, research shows.

Nearly £1.2billion went on administrators and clerical staff in Primary Care Trusts in 2007/8, a rise of 81 per cent since 2003/4.

The total is nearly twice as much as the £700 million the Health Service spent on anti-cancer drugs last year, with some patients being denied life-prolonging medication.

A further £139 million was spent on management consultants - almost three times as much as the £ 53 million spent five years ago.