Picture this. Imagine a society in which it has been decided that only the very rich can afford health care. If you become ill and require medical intervention, the basis for treatment will be only the size of your wallet. You don’t have to imagine for too long. This will soon be the future for many Americans.
It has been said that if you were to collapse on an American street, the paramedics would arrive and look firstly to establish not your pulse but the presence of your wallet. Urgent medical treatment could follow later, if at all. Depends on whether you could afford it. The imminent death of affordable healthcare in the United States of America means exactly that.
When people ask me about my politics – and if they read this blog, they don’t need to ask – then I say my politics is defined by our National Health Service where people are treated not on the ability to pay but because they are ill. If you require any kind of medical help, then I believe you should get it, free at the point of delivery. And you should be entitled to the best treatment available. Nothing you receive should be the second best alternative. This is not the cheapest option available, but I do not look upon health care as something you decide by what it costs. To me, it doesn’t matter what it costs.
Donald Trump says otherwise. He hates affordable health care, not least, though not solely, because it has been nicknamed Obamacare. It goes against everything he stands for. Trump is as far from socialism as you can possibly get and affordable health care flies in the face of everything he believes in. Our NHS must positively horrify Trump. Health care, in his eyes, is not some kind of human right. Health care, through my eyes, is some kind of human right.
The American right sees the very idea of universal health care as a threat to the state. The land of the free means that nothing can be free. Health care for all is anathema. It’s the Soviet Union, China and North Korea all rolled into one. If you have cancer, don’t come crawling to the state: sell your house to pay for treatment. This is not America.
What America does today, we usually copy tomorrow. Today, Trump seeks to be rid of affordable health care, tomorrow with Britain in post Brexit meltdown Theresa “the appeaser” May, Trump’s hand-holding puppet, informs us that because of those nasty Europeans who won’t give us a decent deal, we have to get rid of the NHS. This is not fanciful, it is already happening.
I always believed that leaving the EU would see the end of the NHS and, after June 8th, I expect to be proved right. If you don’t have enough money, you deserve to die. I don’t expect to see that one in the Tory manifesto.
