The Daily Background
| Fear, uncertainty and doubt about health care waiting lists
by Arlen Parsa
Waiting lists, waiting lists, waiting lists! OMG! Michael Moore is a terrible person!
Michael Moore’s denunciation of America’s health-care system is about to hit the silver screen. In the film’s trailer, a desk attendant at a British hospital smiles while explaining that in Britain’s National Health Service, “everything is free.” But for free hospital care, Britons pay an awfully high price.
Just ask the nearly 1 million British patients on waiting lists for treatment. Or the 200,000 Britons currently waiting merely to get on NHS waiting lists. Mr. Moore must have missed those folks.
Ah, the spreading of FUD. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.
The author of this op-ed writes “Consider waiting lists. Across Britain, patients wait years for routine — or even emergency — treatments. And many die while waiting.” First of all, emergency stuff gets priority in Britain and other places with universal health care, just like it does in the United States.
Second of all, even if this point was correct, the exact same thing happens here in America. And you know what? A hell of a lot more often; “about 18,000 Americans die each year of treatable diseases because they don’t have health care coverage–a number comparable to having a 9/11 disaster occur every other month.”
The argument boils down to basically, “Everyone has the right to have health care” versus “I am greedy enough that I would rather let 45 million of my fellow Americans be uninsured and risk dying from easily-cured or prevented problems like toothaches, than risk having to wait a short time for free health care when non-essential procedures are done.”
In a broader sense, that’s the difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives think about the wellbeing of everybody, regardless of how much money they have, and progressives believe that everybody has the right to be afforded the benefits of modern medicine (our taxes already subsidize the vast majority of the cost of researching new medications). Conservatives on the other hand reject this notion of everybody being “in it together,” and would rather it be everybody for themselves.
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