Nothing is perfect, and that definitely includes health care. On the 70th anniversary of the first full-coverage national health-care system that is ‘free at the point of delivery’, Britain’s National Health Service, English people have been marching in the streets demanding better funding for the NHS, and Donald Trump naturally got the wrong end of the stick again.
Back in February, as part of his war against Barack Obama’s attempt to improve the coverage of the rudimentary U.S. health-care system (‘Obamacare’), Trump claimed the marchers were protesting because the British system is “going broke and not working.”
It’s tough trying to defend the existing U.S. system when every other developed country provides universal health coverage for its citizens, but Trump battled bravely onwards, later tweeting that the Democrats in the United States “want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care.” Like the British allegedly suffer under the NHS.
In fact, the English National Health Service is, in former Conservative cabinet member Nigel Lawson’s words, “the closest thing the English have to a religion.” It is almost universally loved, and the protests were about government under-funding of the NHS.
But are the English right to love their health-care system — and are the French and Germans and Russians and Japanese and the people of almost every other developed country right to revere their own similar systems? The United States may be the odd country out, but it does spend far more on health care than anybody else.
The United States spends 16 per cent of its entire Gross Domestic Product on health care, almost twice as much as the average. In theory, that ought to mean that Americans are healthier than everybody else and live longer. In practice, it’s just the opposite.
The United States is the only developed country where the average life-span is less than 80. In fact, it’s barely 78 years in the U.S., whereas everywhere else it’s in 80-82 range.
The U.S. also has the highest ‘preventable death’ rate of any developed country, and the highest infant mortality rate by a very wide margin. Americans spend more on health, and get less back, than anybody else.
The model that was pioneered by Britain’s NHS on July 5, 1948, has been so successful that it is now spreading into many developing countries as well. India is still a poor country, but its National Health Policy 2017 goals include a commitment to “progressively achieve Universal Health Coverage.” China is working to provide affordable basic health care to all residents by 2020. And so on.
Attitudes change over time. In the 1930s nobody thought that there was some sort of basic human right to health care. What changed that attitude was the Second World War, a time of great national solidarity and sacrifice in every country.
It was the worst war in history, but it produced a generation who believed that the people who had shared in the sacrifice must not be left behind in the peace that followed. The will was there to do new and great things, and they did them.
It is no coincidence that the same year of 1948 saw the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which said that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”
The world had turned, and what had been a privilege became a right. One that is still widely abused or neglected, of course, but it has nevertheless spread across the entire planet in the past 70 years. Why did the United States miss out?
The answer is probably a free-market ideology so strong that it enabled the insurance companies and the medical profession to win the political battle in the U.S. and strangle the idea in its cradle. It keeps coming back even there, but for the moment Americans must go on paying the costs of their ideology.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).