Stupidity and its effects on international politics

[fpb]

A sentence from the political struggle in America has gone viral in Britain, as an example of the ignorance, stupidity and vicious prejudice that drives a certain part of American public opinion. This is the sentence: People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless. This piece of folly does not come from some twelve-reader blog out in freakland, but from the Investors' Business Daily, favoured and eagerly quoted intellectual leader of the conservative movement.

The Professor himself has just responded in no uncertain terms: "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." For that matter, every Briton, indeed every European, who is disabled or has a disabled relative - which include yours truly - knows what to think of it. Indeed, the NHS as a whole is, without exception, the most respected and downright loved body in British society, with a level of public credibility and support that no other organization or group even dreams of. To use it as a kind of bogeyman is an outrage against everything the British hold dear, and I am not, repeat not, exaggerating.

Not that I harbour any hope that anyone over there might even pay attention. The self-absorption, the self-regard, the total unwillingness to learn from abroad, that are among the most infuriating characteristics of the American conservative mind, have reached the point of total separation from reality in this particular matter. Hysteria about "socialized medicine" has become so widespread among American conservatives that any response from Europe would only be met with a barrage of insults. (All right, American conservatives: if I am wrong - prove it!! But I forecast that this post will receive nothing from my conservative friends, except perhaps the odd attack on my motivations or morals.)

The IBD itself has tried to rewrite its outrageous original argument, without realizing that it is simply a minor part of a misrepresentation of the British experience so huge and deeply stupid as to discourage anything except contempt from anyone who actually knows the facts. The only thing they have seen fit to correct is the evidence that they were unaware of Professor Hawking's nationality, but they have not even begun to wrap their minds around the obvious fact that this gratuitous and grotesque howler is symptomatic of the fallacy in their whole argument - that they are talking about something that simply does not exist and that has no relation to reality.

Comments

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

Having spent several hours debating the issue with a friend the other night, I think the problem is this: there are some who see health care as an issue of social justice, regardless of the economics of the matter. There are some who see economics as paramount, regardless of their compassion for individuals. It's hard, if not impossible, to reconcile these worldviews.

(For the record, we both self-identify as Christians, and he stated that Jesus "only said that we have free will and we shouldn't do bad things." I think he should maybe consider doing a little reading in his spare time.)

For my part, I see health care reform in the US as an issue of both economics AND social justice, but the economic arguments are being lost in, as you say, the shrieking about "socialized medicine."

Indeed, "Too Stupid to Exist" was effectively demonstrated

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

The wackiest part of the argument is that we already have government run health care - for the very poor and very sick and very old. Letting the rest of us buy into it is the next logical step. We're just not taught to make the hard choices.. Most of us are not equipped to argue our position, if we can even think of all the consequences. That's what should be scaring our socks off. That we deny that other people to do it for us is the mystery at the heart of our collective anxiety.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

I don't understand the argument against the current reforms, mainly becuase I do not think I have seen a coherant argument put by anyone. All I have seen is vague references to the UK or Canada and how dreadful their systems are.

In many cases what it seems to boil down to is "I have health care, if everyone else gets free healthcare there won't be enough cash to look after me properly, so those people without health insurance can get stuffed.

I'd be interested in reading something that was more coherant in terms of the opposition to the plan if anyone can point me in that direction.

The ecconomics of helth care are important. Perhaps if the insurance companies and the health trusts were run as public companies for the good of the nation, rather than as profit making organisations, then the ecconomics would make more sense. But that would probably be described as socialism by some.

Its disturbing to see the lies and the misrepresentations about the health service of the UK in the current debate. Especially on shows presented by giys like Sean Hannity or Glen Beck. We all moan about the NHS, and at times the hospitals could do with a lick of paint. But free health care, provided according to need, is something we can be very proud off in the UK. (and lets remember, we have the option for private care as well)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

About your last paragraph: what we have here is the result of the accumulated anti-NHS polemics of the Daily Jail and of the hunt for horror stories by other media trash. Anyone who knew nothing but newspaper reports, and who were foolish enough to believe them, might well believe that our system is a mixture of third world indigence and concentration camp. We should remember that you can become ignorant by reading as well as remain ignorant by failing to read; all you have to do is read the wrong stuff. If Murdoch, Rothermere and the successive owners of the Express group have been so successful in reducing the collective IQ of Great Britain, what effect can they have had on people who do not even have the corrective experience of actually living in the country?

There have to be better reasons to argue against Obama's proposal than the various hysteria-mongers of Fox TV (never, never forget who owns it!) have given, but, like you, I find the noise and anger too distracting, and even when I tried to focus on any apparently clear argument, I find distortions and lies about other countries to be at the heart of it. What does seem to be the case, however - and it is enough to damn the effort in my eyes - is that the bill is being used as a Trojan horse to impose a "right" of abortion on Americans. This is a highly simplified description of what it embodies, but where abortion is concerned I have learned to be suspicious of everything, and there is something highly sinister about the way that amendments that would insure a right of objection or deny abortion on public money have been systematically shot down, even when proposed by Democrats.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Don't the systems in the UK and Canada pay for abortion? Why should we be different?

Out of curiosity, what did you think of Palin's "death panels" speech?

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Don't the systems in the UK and Canada pay for abortion? Why should we be different?

Because funding abortion is objectively wrong, and (despite the fact that some states do elect to pay for abortions that the federal government won't cover under the hyde amendment) broad state funding for abortions is not yet the status quo here?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"objectively wrong", haha. Not to me. But even if one thinks so, is it so wrong as to cancel out the wrong of not having universal health care?

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

You speak as though universal health care which covered abortions and no universal health care at all were the only two conceivable options.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

They're not, but I took fpb's text to mean the abortion inclusion was a fatal blow to UHC. If I misread him, I apologize.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It is as far as I am concerned - not so much the original fact, but the evident intention to ram it through against every opposition. And incidentally, it will not do much for Catholic support for Obama and the Democrats.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As the Democrats are managing this particular piece of legislation, that seems to be the case at present. They are making things extremely difficult for - for instance - the US Catholic bishops, who support universal health care but cannot accept the need for abortion.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Stupid jokes get deleted.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If universal health care is used as a Trojan horse to force even more direct abortion with less or no safeguards for opposition to it, as the Democrats are certainly using it, then it makes it objectively impossible even for someone like me, who believes in the principle, to support it as it is presented. Remember that, even disregarding abortion, Obama's main intellectual sin on this one has been to present a bill so complicated and enormous, on a schedule so tight, that discussion and alteration are made more or less impossible.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Funding for abortion already exists in the USA - every state and federal dollar that goes or went to Planned Parenthood, the late George Tiller and their greedy likes objectively pays for killing babies, because money is fungible, and even if public money supposedly only pays for sexual health clinics and the likes, nonetheless it frees other money for killing babies.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Admittedly so. And there is also the simple matter that, in spite of the hyde amendment, medicare already funds (via the states) many more abortions than most people imagine. The main thing is that I really don't want to see it further institutionalized.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Also, for convenience, is this the "death panels" post to which you're referring?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is not actually what everyone was referring to; in fact, it is a response to Obama's response to Palin's original formulation (Obama was leaving anonymous the claim about "death panels", but everyone in the USA knows who made it.) I have read it through. The argument is tendentious at best. It is an accumulation of ifs and mights, predicated upon the claim that in any conflict between patient welfare and cost-cutting, the cost-cutting would prevail. What Mrs.Palin has done is at best to demonstrate that if that central assumption is accepted in each and every case, then she had a right to speak as she did.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That if it applies to anything like what exists in Europe, it was a paranoid fantasy. Even where euthanasia, alas, exists - in that antechamber of Hell known as the Low Countries - it is not decided upon by bureaucrats In the UK, Mrs.Palin would have had the exact same experience that she had in the USA - a suggestion that, since the foetus had a serious abnormality, she, the mother, might consider having an abortion. This is inhuman, but it is the mother who is the "death panel" - the doctors and bureaucrats abide by her decision. By the same token, we had a Health Service for a generation before the crimes of abortion and euthanasia were spoken of. The two things have nothing in common, and were introduced in the USA at the same time as in Europe.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Out of curiousity, are you aware of cases like the one in Oregon which made headlines last year (I think the patient's name was Barbara Wagner)?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. Euthanasia is currently illegal in Britain, although a section of the Establishment is pushing hard to legalize it by stealth.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Basically in those cases, the Oregon health system is refusing to pay for cancer drugs for certain cancer patients whose treatment they don't deem worthwhile (at the same time they are also explicitly offering to pay for the drugs for a physician-assisted suicide, but that is another matter). In those cases it is state bureaucrats who are making the decision about treatment; these are patients who cannot afford private coverage.

The two cases I'm specifically aware of from last year involved patients named Barbara Wagner and Randy Stroup. As far as I can tell the policy has not been revised since, although after the bad PR they are not pushing euthanasia so hard. In any case, Wagner's case was only resolved when the drug company offered to donate the medicine.

The reason I take Palin's scenario more seriously than I might otherwise is not because it bears a particular relation to the European experience, but because it describes things already happening in the US on a smaller scale.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Euthanasia is unfortunately legal in Belgium and the Netherlands, and I am told for a fact that old people in those countries often refuse to visit their doctors for fear lest they should be booked for the exit lounge. So I take the matter seriously. But in Britain as such we have had nothing as outrageous, although there is currently a vicious and loud push by the euthanasia forces to get it legalized by hook or by crook.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

The ecconomics of helth care are important. Perhaps if the insurance companies and the health trusts were run as public companies for the good of the nation, rather than as profit making organisations, then the ecconomics would make more sense. But that would probably be described as socialism by some.

In the German system, the main insurance providers aren't publicly held, but they are nonprofits and get a reasonable amount of oversight. That seems to be sufficient to remove the worst incentives for bad behavior on the part of insurers.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There are many different ways of doing this, and they suit different countries. The German system resembles what used to be the case in Italy before the late nineteen-seventies; it did not work in Italy, and was overlaid by a new system more like the British, but heavily localized. Japan and France, as I understand it, have a heavy private component in their system. I have an idea that Obama's problem has been to propose a system that is virtually incomprehensible, over-detailed and not open to argument.

Another data point

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Belgium also has private nonprofit insurance providers. The costs and services covered are identical for all of them; this is mandated by law. I have no idea what people perceive to be the difference between them, but there are five of them.

It is also possible to obtain supplemental coverage through private insurers to offset those costs which the compulsory system does not cover; as far as I am aware, this includes extra costs associated with hospital stays (e.g., if a patient wants to stay in a private room), orthodontics, and "alternative" (i.e., non-evidence-based) treatments.

Thus far I am quite happy with the health care my family has received, and we draw on the health care system rather more than most families do. (I would rather we did not have to, but that is the hand we have been dealt.)

[deansteinlage.livejournal.com]

If push came to shove, I would identify myself as more of a conservative than a liberal. I pray that I always strive to be an orthodox Catholic first.
I don't know if the originator of that smear was stirring the pot or projecting their own fears about the course they see the US taking. The end result is the same, tarring a group of people unfairly. The stupidity of not knowing that Professor Hawkings is British!
The health care reform bill going on here is a monster, but that does not justify grabbing anything that looks like a stick to beat it with.
For what its worth, I'm sorry about this.

[wyrdwood.livejournal.com]

The sheer ignorance of my fellow Americans concerning anything about other countries, especially health care, is appalling. In light of the current debate, it's actually life-threatening for those who really need health care. The fear-driven rage being expressed in the "town hells" might cause the whole effort to fail or become so watered down -- or worse, become a giant subsidy for private company profits without any actual improved practices -- that we'll be worse off than we are at present. If they'd only stuck to the idea of Medicare for all, without the convoluted, bureaucratic attempts to salvage the private insurance system, it would be far less confusing and fear-generating.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The private insurance system can look after itself. It does quite well over here - look up BUPA and such.