Gordon Brown joins Twitter campaign defending NHS

[oldironside]

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his wife, Sarah, last night weighed in on the increasingly acrimonious debate over the NHS by joining a Twitter campaign defending the health service from attacks by US Republicans intent on derailing President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/13/stephen-hawking-nhs-twitter-welovethenhs

[PaulJosephPoposky]

1. Its a real shame

no one has really pointed out yet but Obama's insurance reform proposals will NOT even come close to building an NHS here, in fact, if anything ObamaCare with its subsidies to insurance companies and personal mandates will make it harder in the future for us to get a single payer NHS here...

I recognize - and know very well, FIRSTHAND - that we cannot afford to leave the system the way it is in the US, but I cannot in any way, at any level support ObamaCare because it will do nothing at all to address the real cause of 100,000 Americans who die every year because of the sort of non-system we've got for handling healthcare;of those 20,000 or more die because of lack of healthcare insurance and most of the huge remainder - 80,000 - die because of the extremely low quality of care they did recieve or because they are underinsured... OR because they thought they had "good" insurance until they got sick and found out otherwise the hard way!

The only solution, the only way to remedy this is single payer, and it really upsets me that the right wingers are attacking NHS and spreading brutal lies, but also it upsets me that some liberals in this country are trying to underhandedly imply that ObamaCare is comehow a steppingstone to single payer

[LeftishBrit]

2. Even Cameron has denounced it, and is furious with the far-right Tory MEP Hannan

who fuelled the attacks, but is not representative of even the Tories in Britain.

[oldironside]

3. I'm not so sure about that.

Did you read Cameron's "ringing endorsement" of the NHS? It was hardly on a par with "We shall fight them on the beaches". Reads more like political arse covering to me. If Cameron's furious it's because Hannan rocked the boat. If the Tories get in with an absolute majority next year you can look forward to further expansion of the internal market, further rationalisations, further cuts. Maybe Fox News has done the UK a favour by pushing this debate to the top of the political agenda and exposing what more than a few Tories really believe.

Pray for a hung parliament. Maybe then the whole corrupt system can get the overhaul it so blatanlty needs. And then again, maybe not.