I too have acquaintances who, whilst aware of and loudly bewailing the many many failings of the NHS, and the unnecessary deaths – sometimes thousands of deaths – that it causes, will in the very next sentence say something like “but aren’t we lucky to have it, if it wasn’t for the NHS I’d be bankrupt and dead” or some such piffle. They are so brainwashed that they cannot even conceive that there might be any other way of organizing things – even though alternatives are all around us, and all of them without exception produce better outcomes. Astonishing.
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 15th, 2014 |
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Criticism of the NHS is the Last Taboo.
This is one of the reasons I do not often write about British politics.
British history is taught as a progress by which “at first there was darkness and then THE STATE said let-there-be-light” – in health care or anything else. In the United States there is this effort at “education” also – but there it is contested, here it is not.
Even many British Conservatives assume that “social reform” (i.e.. the expansion of the state in the past) was a good thing – and the only criticism that is made (by anybody – regardless of party) of “social reformer” such as Disraeli, is that they were not really “social reformers” (that their increase in the size and scope of the state was too timid – or whatever).
There is a limit to the number of brick walls I am prepared to smash my head against.
Ha ha ha…you know, it’s funny, in the US there was discussion of “Death Panels”, responsible for the denial of “gub’mint supervised” health services, when PP ACA, commonly known as Obama care, was NOT being read before it was “passed, with clearly defined provisions subsequently ignored by (wait for it) President Obama’s phone OR Pen. . Naturally, “certain” folks with good intentions pooh poohed such talk as delusional.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce the Department of Veterans Affairs “health” administration!
A lot of people will pretty much let you off the hook for any result, no matter how terrible, if they believe your intentions were good. And that’s compounded by people also supporting an idea based on motivation, rather than on more useful criteria. To criticize the NHS, a person who voted for it (or would have voted for it) not only has to see past the ostensibly good intentions of other people, but also has to admit their own judgement error. Not a lot of people are that open minded. So they will continue to focus on the full part of the glass until there is little or none left.
Any criticism is inevitably followed by, “But everything would be solved if they only had more money, resources and control.”
I’m regularly told that the NHS would be perfect if only all the resources currently ‘wasted’ in private medicine were seized by the State and added to the NHS pot.
The only response worth making to this widely believed nonsense is, “How much resources is enough for the NHS to work? 10% 20% 50% 100%?”
“There is a limit to the number of brick walls I am prepared to smash my head against.”
Somehow, Paul, I have trouble believing that.
Most people cannot imagine ideas they have never heard of, or encountered only as strawmen parodies set up just so that they can be knocked down.
For over a century, the progressive, collectivist vision has been the guiding script for much of our educational systems and our public debates. Any attempt to deviate from or seriously question that construct was met with sarcastic ridicule and/or vicious personal attacks against the questioner.
Some cultures used to fervently believe that the way to prevent volcanic eruptions was to throw a child into the caldera once in a while to assuage the gods in charge. When the volcano erupted anyway, the response was to throw in more babies, not question the claims of the priests about the desires of the gods.
We are in roughly an analogous situation now, except that we throw our children into the maw of the collective, and then wonder at the chewed up scraps of mis-educated debris we get back.
We are committing intellectual, moral, and cultural suicide on a massive scale. It is unprecedented in history for a culture to destroy itself from within the way we are currently engaged in our own de-construction.
The west is becoming Detroit on the grand scale.