Posts
My dad very recently had emergency brain surgery in a great neuroscience department of a hospital. And he is now convalescing in a ward that looks like it was built in 1941. It's a total disgrace. Plus, I had to explain to him what had happened and which hospital he was currently in, since no-one else had bothered to do so. My metaphor for the NHS still stands. The NHS, I always say, is like a crap boyfriend - who you're really grateful for at some key moments, and but are ultimately infuriated by.
What normally happens though, is that after dramatic surgery people say things like 'Hey, I bet you're glad about the NHS now?' or 'Maybe it isn't so bad afterall...' This is even more infuriating as it dunderheadedly presupposes that if there weren't an NHS there would simply be no healthcare system at all. No chain of usable hospitals at all. Or at least only one eye-wateringly expensive private system. That is like saying - "if there was no Tesco, Sainsburys or ASDA, millions of people would be without food". No, they would get their food from others in a different way. If there were no NHS, there would be other non-national 'health services'. And a different system altogther.
When people congratulate the NHS for saving lives, they are mistaking individual surgeons and doctors, and advances in medical science, with the NHS. If the superb surgeon who operated on my dad was not employed by the NHS, he probably would not be a postman or surveyor. He'd still be an excellent surgeon in a different hospital run in a different way, operating on my dad. And maybe that other hospital, my dad's ward would have matching curtains that both reach down to the window sill and keep out the light. It's the little things that tell you about the big ones.
I mention this as Doug Wilson makes some useful comments about Obama's latest healthcare pronouncements here. And here. I like this bit:
Support your church's missionaries. Give to the inner city work that your denomination sponsors. Jesus said to give in His name. He never told us to go out there and take in His name.
The Church is called to be an organization of worshippers, worship that results in a glorious overflow of givers. The statists, leftists, do-gooders, and sob-sisters are an organization of confused takers. They talk as though they are giving, but the whole thing is a sham. They give only what they have previously seized by force. And to crown this glorious hypocrisy, they preen themselves on their ethical conscience and moral superiority. But there are few spectacles worse than thugs with guns acting all Sermon-on-the-Mounty.
1 comments:
Anecdotal evidence is always dangerous, but here's one piece: through good times and bad, our experience of the NHS has been very good, and our experience of private, insurance-funded medicine has been mixed: excellent care, but financially limiting (do you take someone to A&E for an injury if you know it will set you back £50 per visit?). There you go, my tuppence's worth.
There was an interesting, though brief discussion, by conservative Christian Americans on universal health care here. The author of the post is no Obama-lover or crypto-Democrat, nor are any of the respondents, to my knowledge.
My additional penny's worth is this: if the NHS sucks, does it mean that the NHS must by necessity suck? That appears to be Wilson's point. I don't think he has demonstrated that. [Much as I find the man refreshing, he does have a tendency to assert rather than argue...]
A different sort of anecdote:
In most of Scandinavia, the welfare state was the result of unashamed godless Social Democracy, which has wrought untold damage on those societies. But in some parts, something very different was at stake: the idea of solidarity. If all men are equally valuable as cannon fodder in times of crisis, then all men must also share in the fruits of freedom. May sound like Socialism, but it ain't so.
Post a Comment