GOP Nominee

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Well that's pretty damning, isn't it?

It is why I keep banging on about it.

It is litterally because I love you guys, but I would never visit your country so long as I am this poor and your healthcare is that expensive.

Short version of my take: Single-payer healthcare has its ups and downs, but it appears to be the cheapest method for covering the population.

A purely market-based system of healthcare may be cheaper, depending on which economic theories you choose to believe, but it has never been tried on a national scale in a developed country. (I would be a lot more confident in the Republicans who advocate a pure market system if they could point to a single real-world example. Empiricism FTW.)

Here in the USA we've managed to take the worst aspects of single-payer and fuse them to the worst aspects of a broken market system, yielding the most expensive healthcare on Earth. Yay us.

The only upside to our system is that if you have a great deal of wealth (in the form of gold-plated insurance or good old cash), some low-percentage diseases and conditions can be treated at a much higher level of competence than in any single-payer system. So if you've got some weird variant of lymphoma, and your pockets are functionally bottomless, you can buy better treatment here.

And that's about it.

Yes, but we have private in the UK, it's not quite as swishy but if you're that wealthy over here you just hop over the pond anyway. Your medical research is top notch, places like the Mayo clinic save lives the world over, but there isn't any trickle down if you don't have any money.

I am aware of the relative strengths (cost, coverage) and weaknesses (care) of the NHS. Why would we want to replace our own mediocre system with another mediocre system? As I said, there are much better models to choose from.

In the last four years both my parents and my two surviving grandparents had life saving surgery (except for my Grandmother, she only had breast cancer), none of them complained about the care - only the food. Without the NHS my Grandmother would be dead (no money for cancer drugs) my Grandfather would be dead (no insurrence company would pay to put a stent in a 99 year old man's heart) my father might be dead (he had a ruptured apendix, in the US he might not have gone to the doctor for a bad bellyache) my mother would have survived (head trauma from falling from a horse) but we'd still be paying the ICU bill.

All for less than half what your country spends, less even than what your government spends.

Don't give me "one medicocr system for another" rubbish, the NHS saves everyone's lives, no matter their economic circumstances, it may be a bit ragged on the edges but the core life-saving work gets done, and done well.

Your system gives you a nice room and polite staff who know their jobs, but only if you pay.

You mean like Top Gear and that wonderfully objective exposé posted above? I thought the discussion was about our how awful our news was in comparison. NPR is remarkably similar in its format and reporting to the BBC, although it is a bit less sensationalist.

Top Gear is a national joke (in the sense that it is made to make us laugh) and that Panarama showed something I've never seen a mainstream news program on a major chanel in the Us show, or even comment on.

Well that could be true as I don't have access to the full suite of wonderful BBC programming to tell me what to think.

The people who run the BBC are a bunch of limp lefties, but they lose their jobs if they falsify facts.