Alex Massie writes about Britain’s much-loved-much-loathed NHS:
There are, I think, two essential truths in international health policy. No-one sees fit to copy the National Health Service and no-one sees fit to copy the American system….
The relevance of the NHS to American health care plans seems pretty limited anyway since, as best I can tell (though I try not to pay too much attention to these things) Obama doesn’t actually plan on copying the NHS.
That last sentence really is correct, by the way. It’s true that some things aren’t entirely what they seem: they’re Trojan horses for something else, or maybe the camel’s nose under the tent that will eventually lead to more fundamental reforms. Both sides do this on occasion. I, for example, happen to think that community rating (along with the cloud of regulations that accompany it) will eventually put private insurance companies out of business — or, at a minimum, turn them into little more than semi-public utilities. I don’t know how many other people agree about that, but you could certainly accuse me of pushing for community rating not just because I like it as a policy, but because I think it will eventually lead to more systematic reform of the healthcare industry.
But with the exception of a few outliers, the liberal community really, truly doesn’t want a fully government owned and operated healthcare system like the NHS. We want a government-funded healthcare system like Medicare or most of the world outside of Britain. And unless I’m mistaken, this isn’t a ruse in any way. That’s really what most of us want: basic care funded by taxes, with additional care available to anyone who wants to pay for more. France and Holland, not Britain or Canada.
