![16lyall_large2 CARED FOR The physicist Stephen Hawking is a defender of Britain’s National Health.](https://suzieqq.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/16lyall_large2.jpg?w=500&h=341)
CARED FOR The physicist Stephen Hawking is a defender of Britain’s National Health.
By SARAH LYALL | NYT | August 15, 2009
LONDON — There are times when, viewed from afar, American political discourse looks like nothing more than a huge brawl conducted by noisy, ill-informed polemicists. This is one of them, as Britain found last week when the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was, bizarrely, drawn into the raucous debate over the health care proposals of President Obama and Congress.
Mr. Hawking, 67, has Lou Gehrig’s disease, is paralyzed, speaks through a voice synthesizer and needs a great deal of medical attention. He also lives in Britain. This makes him a spectacularly unfortunate choice to pick as an example of the evils of the National Health Service, which has provided free health care — to him, and to millions of other people here — for 61 years.
But that is what Investor’s Business Daily did on Aug. 3, in an editorial opposing Mr. Obama’s proposals by accusing him of wanting to institute an N.H.S.-style system in America. Mr. Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K.,” the newspaper declared, because the health service would declare his life “essentially worthless.”
The paper printed a correction, and Mr. Hawking issued a statement saying that, actually, the health service had helped keep him alive.
I am also an American living in Britain. And to sum up what Sarah Lyall wrote: when the NHS is good, it’s heaven; when it’s bad, it’s hell.
Hi Reality check and thanks for your comment on the article I posted earlier today.
I am a Brit resident in Britain with a deep interest in US history and politics, as my posts on this blog attest to.
I have some cause to be grateful to this institution because of the surgeon who was able to set my arm after a compound double fracture sustained at the age of 9 and for the operation to reverse the Volkmann’s ischemia which resulted from that fracture a few years later.
My sister has worked for the NHS all her life and is intensely jealous for it.
I read a few years ago in the Spectator that in America if you get cancer the chances are you will survive but that you will be bankrupt.
In Britain, on the other hand, you will die but you will remain solvent.
An English friend of my mother’s whom I have not seen for more than 40 years and who I met again a few weeks ago and who is now an American citizen agrees.
There are some simple facts about the British healthcare system. After the Second World War, British government instituted the free healthcare service for all. This was also part of Labour Party’s socio-political programme to pull the working class people and their families out of the abject conditions under which they had lived since the Industrial Revolution. These people had scant resources to pay for medical treatment; this situation needed a remedy. The solution was the National Health Service for all. It is true the rich in Britian, like the rich in the United States or anywhere else in the world, had no problem in getting the best available treatment. But the overwhelming majority of the population did not belong to that class of people. Despite all the shortcomings, the system has helped the British people. Without the NHS the vast majority of the population had no chance to cope with the healthcare expenses.
It is understandable that the American model is more suited to those who have the resources. But what about those millions of ordinary Americans who have no health insurance or money to pay for their treatment?
The Obama administration’s efforts to change the unjust system are laudable. But the vested interests that have exploited the vast majority of ordinary Americans for so long will oppose any change. Their misleading campaign to sabotage the major welfare step by the Obama administration is to protect those fiscal interests at the cost of the ordinary American people with low incomes or those who are economically and socially at the bottom of the scale.