An American Neocon defends the NHS

[OldGit]

Well I never, but then she has intimate knowledge of its effects in the life of her friend.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/60...s-the-NHS.html



Carol Gould may belong to the American political Right, but witnessing how the NHS cared for her severely ill British friend gave her a new repect for "socialised" medicine.

By Carol Gould
Published: 11:43AM BST 18 Aug 2009



London's NHS hospitals should be a source of pride Photo: Reuters


In the wake of the public outcry in the United States that has seen the conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh apparently compare universal health care to some sort of neo-Nazi Reich I thought I would recount a story from earlier this year. Let me make my political leanings clear from the outset: I am a neocon. Having supported the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush triumvirate and their Iraq and Afghanistan interventions I have duly enraged thousands who listen to me on the BBC and watch me on Sky and Press TV. Notwithstanding this my views on universal health care are strictly Socialist.
From November 2008 to March 2009 I lived in a parallel universe. It is a universe in which many may have dwelt: the world of Life Support in Intensive Care. But more than that it has been a story of British health care at its magnificent best.
In mid-November my close friend Dee rang to tell me she was feeling odd. She was house-sitting for a friend in London and said she had eaten some freshly-baked soda bread from a new patisserie in St John’s Wood and had begun to feel ill. When she worsened I began to think that the bread had been destined for a Russian oligarch or Litvinenko-esque exile, as her symptoms were so severe. On day two she told me she was riven with fever and chills; I told her it was ‘flu but she said she would see a homeopath.
Within a day she was in hospital. She was on Life Support at St. Mary’s Hospital, where the prognosis was 50-50.
I stopped everything and went to the hospital. Allowed in to the Intensive Care Unit by a young and charming doctor when I explained I was a close friend of thirty years‘ standing, what greeted me can only be described as a scene from a horror film. Dee was attached to every machine in creation. She was the colour of Death. Her kidneys had shut down and she was on dialysis. Like most people who live out their lives never having experienced catastrophic medical events I had never seen a dialysis machine and remember uttering a sort of ‘Auwgh!’ sound. She required close to 100 per cent oxygen, was on a ventilator and attached to an array of innumerable tubes and needles. I went into shock. Even the sight of my mother in intensive care before her death had not prepared me for this.
All the while the vast unit hummed away, the good-natured nurses and youthful doctors taking turns attending patient after patient in various stages of near-demise. Dee was in critical, near grave condition and I was told ‘This is as bad as it gets’ by one weary nurse. The physiotherapist said that if Dee survived it would be ‘six months to a year’ before she could be a normal, functioning individual. She had pneumonia and possibly Legionnaire’s Disease complicated by total renal failure.
In the ensuing days Dee’s condition remained grave and though she had been stabilised by the intensive care unit, her family and I had begun to talk about funeral arrangements. In the waiting room I developed a fellowship with other people spending hours at the hospital waiting to see if death was imminent or if tomorrow might bring continuing life.
Over the weeks scores of specialists, ward doctors, nurses and physiotherapists tended Dee’s case. This was the National Health Service at its magnificent best. Never once was anyone pestered for money or insurance forms. She had to have a trachaeotomy the day after her birthday (the sweet nurses reminded the visitors of this), was being monitored for a multitude of issues and had come through septic shock, but the road to recovery was still an arduous one.
I will stop here for a moment and say that whenever I go public about the beauty of universal health care I am inundated with hate mail from Britons who have had to wait months for vital surgery and by Americans terrified of a bungling system being brought in to the USA. The NHS is far from perfect and there are indeed many horror stories. One can posit that there are negative scenarios in private medicine as well. How will I ever forget the beautiful manager of my local salon who at a tender age died in cardiac arrest because the ‘celebrity private hospital’ in which she was giving birth had insufficient cardiac rescue units available?
Three years ago my own experience of breast surgery was dreadful; it was Christmas and the situation was critical so I ‘went private’ for this procedure. I had had private cover since 1981 and decided it was time to dip into the fund that had accumulated. After surgery I developed a throat infection and was in excruciating pain but was turfed out into sub-zero temperatures by the private hospital because the insurer would not pay for another night‘s stay; I promptly had a haemhorrhage at home. Yes, one does not have to wait for a crucial operation in the private sector but for the vast majority of people who cannot afford insurance or who have pre-existing conditions that preclude coverage an NHS is a blessing.
Back to St Mary’s: I visited Dee every day and evening, often eating at the superb and cheap St Mary’s café. Every time I passed the corner office of the old Praed Street building where Dr Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin I recalled that my life had been saved by Bicillin when I was a child growing up in Philadelphia, my parents hoping I would survive my grave illness at home because they could not afford to have me hospitalized! I make an annual pilgrimage to the Fleming Museum and climb the stairs he used to ascend to his tiny study where the miracle unfolded a century ago.
My diary note of mid-March 2009: ’.. Dee is well enough to venture on an outing courtesy of the NHS: a visit to Soho! Soon she will be able to have her own bedsit flat supervised by a visiting nurse, regular physiotherapy, three meals and afternoon tea each day.’ She was well enough to go on her very first solo trip on March 25 -- the launch of my book at the Travellers Club. She made her own way to Pall Mall and I felt as if the NHS had added an extra dimension of joy to my special night. Having borne witness to the 1948 British NHS promise of care ‘from the cradle to the grave’ I can attest in August, 2009 to Dee being far from her grave.
I have watched a miracle unfold as dozens of modestly paid but utterly devoted medical practitioners have laboured to bring my friend back from the brink. In an environment teeming with the highest levels of professionalism I have watched every aspect of life support administered with meticulous care. In the United States, Dee’s mountain of drugs, equipment support, tubes, disposables and gallons of intravenous feeds and Jevity liquid food plus plain old man and woman-hours would have cost over $1 million by now.
Harry Truman resented the election of Attlee and was obdurate about a postwar healthcare scheme, but had Franklin Delano Roosevelt lived he would have seen the post-war British model brought to the USA. He was a consummate politician who had managed to pass Social Security through a reactionary Congress by enlisting the skills of Republican John Gilbert Winant. FDR rewarded him with the Court of St James during the long years of war, and Winant went on to become the most beloved of any US ambassador. Now that Barack Obama is pursuing universal health care for Americans he needs to woo every ally he can enlist and will need every skill in his repertoire to amalgamate the pharmaceutical and medical insurance companies into a viable and cooperative entity. Knowing how resourceful and success-driven Americans are -- I do believe it is in their DNA -- universal health care will evolve into a better system than has ours in the United Kingdom.
Dee is a living example of the NHS at its best; Rush Limbaugh’s swastikas signified a low point in the current discourse. I urge my fellow Americans to go forward with a system that at its worst can be fixed but at its best embodies the gift of life.
Carol Gould is the author of Don't Tread on Me: Anti-Americanism Abroad and Spitfire Girls. The above is adapted from an article which originally appeared here.

[Phuct]

OG, why is this suprising to you?

Neo-cons believe in large government programs, like progressives. To find one defending it isn't suprising.

I find the ones opposing it now suprising, TBH. All of a sudden they have discovered fiscal conservatism.

Morons.

[Phuct]

This is more instep. Gould had a follow up. Ponder posted it in a diffrent thread.:

Originally Posted by Ponder

You mean like at the NHS?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/this-swine-flu-plan-is-nuts/

[OldGit]

Originally Posted by Phuct

OG, why is this suprising to you?

Neo-cons believe in large government programs, like progressives. To find one defending it isn't suprising.

I find the ones opposing it now suprising, TBH. All of a sudden they have discovered fiscal conservatism.

Morons.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know that.

As for reading the Ponder link, I avoid her like the plague. I believe her to be a paid extremist from some right wing lobby group or other. Even if she isn't, she represents a revolting callousness and arrogance I prefer to avoid engaging with.

[Ponder]

Originally Posted by OldGit

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know that.

As for reading the Ponder link, I avoid her like the plague. I believe her to be a paid extremist from some right wing lobby group or other. Even if she isn't, she represents a revolting callousness and arrogance I prefer to avoid engaging with.

I do need a full-time job, maybe I should look into this! Lol!

The article was written by Carol Gould. I thought you were interested in her views for some reason.

[Phuct]

Originally Posted by OldGit

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know that.

As for reading the Ponder link, I avoid her like the plague. I believe her to be a paid extremist from some right wing lobby group or other. Even if she isn't, she represents a revolting callousness and arrogance I prefer to avoid engaging with.

No problem. I actually learned this from knightroar. As much as we disagreed, he was right. Their beliefs in this areas can be traced all the way through the New Deal era to the Troskiites.

[OldGit]

OK - I read the link and I agree with most of it.

This is not a problem of the NHS, it is a problem of government. This government has belaboured all public service employees with stupid ill-advised micromanagement and target setting intitiatives which focus often on irrelevant priorities to the detriment of service provision. This policy is straight from the government's Department of Health and not the doctors, the hospitals or the nurses, or the management of the same.

My partner is a GP (family doctor). She works in a busy urban practice which has 14000 patients and eight full time doctors and about the same number of nurses and nurse practitioners. As the swine flu problem began to get going, their switchboard became jammed with callers demanding home visits and their waiting room filled with spluttering patients spreading the disease. The idea of a telephone helpline was an important way of stopping the primary care system grinding to a halt. The 14000 patients still contain the same proportion of cancer sufferers and aged patients as before and since the workers at the practice have always been busy, droves of flu sufferers, most of whom are better in a few days could and would have overwhelmed the service.

The danger with the telephone helpline is that flu symptoms may be confused with those of muCH more serious illnesses such as meningitis and other fatal problems. The swineflu website covers this in its early questions and diverts the user to seek urgent medical aid if symptoms such as stiff neck or a persistent rash exist. The helpline has had problems because it was set up hastily in response to the crisis. MY G/F has said to me that if the swine flu was in fact a transmissable version of H5N1 instead of the mild H1N1, we would be fucked, but then so would you.

As to why we have more flu than other nations in europe, it is nothing to do with barbaric toilet behaviour by drunks in cinemas, or bad food hygene. That was just a racist swipe. Such issues are neither the cause of flu transmission and nor are they common. The reason is simple. Influenza thrives in cool, damp periods and in crowded urban populations. This is certainly the most damp, and probably the coolest nation in Europe with a large urban population and is the most densly populated nation too. It is no accident that flu infection is highest in the dreadfully overcrowded south east and the Midlands. That is where the great cities of the UK are. There you have the reason why it has taken off here. It is nothing to do with disgusting behaviour or with the NHS.