American Republicans even manage to upset Tories in anti-NHS crusade.
Good job lads, nice one(!) *slow clap
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8200817.stm
It is Tory policy to support the NHS. It is Cameron's personal passion. Blair once summed up famously in 1996 his priorities for government could be summed up in 3 words. ''Education, Education, Education''. Cameron retorted in 2006, his priorities could be summed up in 3 letters. ''N. H. S''
The bit about his own family is the fact that the Conservative Leader Cameron had a severely disabled son. As the BNP deputy leader Simon Darby said: "Not worth keeping alive". He had cerebral palsy and was completely disabled neck down. He required 24 hour care and suffered up to 30 seizures a day.Tory leader David Cameron, who is not on Twitter, has also weighed in to defend the NHS, saying his party was 100% behind it. He has sent an e-mail message to supporters saying: "Millions of people are grateful for the care they have received from the NHS - including my own family.
"One of the wonderful things about living in this country is that the moment you're injured or fall ill - no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you've got - you know that the NHS will look after you."
Did the NHS euthanase him? Did they put him before the death panel and decide it;s not worth wasting resources on him? No. They cared for the Tory leaders son... with care not available at any private hospital, Cameron has plenty of money. They took his son to school every day, and nurses stayed with him all day to ensure he could lead the most normal life possible. The NHS took care of him completely. The cost must have been enormous, certainly, trips to school, home care and 24 hour nurse care but nonetheless they did so.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...hort-life.html
Sadly he died a few months ago...
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2.../ivan-cameron1
There is also an important political dimension. Cameron is open about how his contact with the NHS shaped his political views.
The Tory leader outlined this in a Guardian interview last July when he said: "I'm sure it's a significant influence in my life. And significant impact in terms of just bringing you into contact with a whole world – not just the NHS but also social services, community nurses, social workers, special schools, therapists, speech and language, hydrotherapy, statementing. You know you become quite an expert in some of these things."
....and what a surprise, the two women who were speaking ill of the NHS were duped.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6795466.ece
Katie Brickell and Kate Spall said that they strongly supported state-funded healthcare, but their descriptions of poor treatment at the hands of the NHS form the centrepiece of an advertising campaign against the proposed reforms in America. Both appear in adverts for Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR), a lobby group that opposes Mr Obama’s plans for universal medical insurance, which have caused a transatlantic rift over the merits of the NHS.Ms Spall, who runs the Pamela Northcott Fund, to fight for patients denied treatment, said that she stood by what she said but was horrified by how her words had been used. “What I said is what I believe, and I stand by it, but the context it has been used in is something I was not aware would happen,” she said. “The irony is that I campaign for exactly the people that socialised healthcare supports. I would not align myself with this group at all.”Hahaha lol, the woman not only supports the NHS her idea of solving it's problems is MORE PUBLIC FUNDING, not privatisation. The exact opposite of what these Republicans want.“The NHS let me down and I just wanted to make the point that people should not rely solely on it. But what I said has been skewed out of proportion. I am slightly worried that people might think I am taking a negative position on the NHS.
“My point was not that the NHS shouldn’t exist or that it was a bad thing. I think that our health service is not perfect but to get better it needs more public money, not less. I didn’t realise it was having such a political impact. I did sign a piece of paper saying they could do what they wanted, so it’s my own fault.”
The last bit especially targeting Steven Hawking was particularly disgusting in my eyes. He's a national treasure, and it was just a low blow to say the NHS would put him in euthanasia, when in actual fact it maintained and supported his life, much like little Ivan Cameron.Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge scientist, has also been drawn into the row after the American newspaper Investor’s Business Daily used an editorial to claim that he “wouldn’t have a chance in the UK” because the NHS would have deemed him “worthless”, given his physical disabilities.
Mr Hawking, who has motor neuron disease, rejected criticism of the NHS yesterday as he collected America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “I would not be here today if not for the NHS,” he said.
Yes this is an impassioned defence of the NHS. I am for it. Benjamin Disraeli, often considered the founder of the modern Conservative Party, and the inventor of the modern organised party system we have in the world... once said; "The Tory Party is nothing if it fails to uphold and strengthen the institutions of this nation'' In those days he talked of Monarchy, Empire, Church and Lords... today the NHS has become an institution at the beating heart of British society.
God knows I'll criticise it, it isn't perfect, it isn't heaven... nowhere near. I will criticise it;s management and it's running, and the top down management and targets and interference Labour has imposed... but going on to say the NHS is an instrument of death, which chooses to kill useless cases like disabled kids, Steven hawking and your grandmother, an instrument of tyranny and repression, is going too ****ing far. The Republicans are bang out of order on this one. It's dirty. It's pathetic, and it's disgusting.
I'll end with the story of the granddaddy Tory himself.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason...14/healthcare/
Aug. 14, 2009 | Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in 1946 warning of the “Iron Curtain” drawn by the Soviet Communists across Eastern Europe. Indeed, journalists and bloggers on the right admire the old warhorse so much that he has even outpolled Ronald Reagan as their “Man of the Century.”
Yet by the standards of the present moment, as these same conservatives mobilize against health care reform to “stop socialism,” that same great man was actually a raving Bolshevik. For among his most enduring legacies was the founding and sustenance of the system that became the National Health Service. Arguably as much as any other British politician, it was Churchill who established “socialized medicine.”
Perhaps it is a forlorn hope that facts and history can make any impression on the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Grassley, or Bill Kristol, but let’s try anyway -- because it is worth understanding that despite the low quality of our own so-called conservatives, there was once another kind.
Churchill was renowned as a politician who put country and civilization above party. The government he led during World War II was a broad coalition of the British parties, from his own Conservatives to the democratic socialists of Labor. Midway through the war, Churchill’s government asked Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party social reformer and economist to study systems of social insurance that could reduce poverty, disease, unemployment and illiteracy in Britain.
In 1942, Beveridge issued an far-reaching report that proposed a national health service to provide medical care to every man, woman and child, regardless of means -- much as the coalition government had done during the medical emergency brought on by the German bombings of their cities, hospitals and clinics.
Although Churchill endorsed the idea of a national health system, his party lost the first post-war general election in 1945, partly because British voters didn’t trust the Tories to implement the Beveridge report. Instead a Labor government established universal care under the NHS in 1948.
Only three years later, the Tories returned to power with Churchill restored as prime minister. At that point, the NHS could still have been killed -- and many members of the Tory party, not to mention the British Medical Association, were eager to do so.
But Churchill asked Claude Guillebaud, a Cambridge economist, to head a committee to study the performance and efficiency of the NHS. The Gillebaud committee found that the NHS was highly effective – and needed additional funding to insure that effectiveness would continue. There was no more talk of dismantling the very popular service, and instead the Tories under Churchill and his immediate successors allocated more money to build additional clinics and hospitals. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most ideological Tory prime minister of modern times, promised voters that “the NHS is safe in our hands.”
As a lifelong conservative with a strong dedication to enterprise and merit (and a host of less admirable right-wing prejudices), Churchill would have bristled at anyone who dared to describe him as a socialist. Why then did he promote and protect the NHS? Partly out of political expediency, no doubt, but also because he felt an ethical obligation that seems not to trouble the contemporary conservatives who profess to admire him.
In March 1944, he eloquently explained his views on medicine and society to the members of Royal College of Physicians in London:
That is what he helped to do -- and for the rest of his life, he fought against the impression that his old adversaries in Labor had established the system alone.The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.
Lately, the subject of the NHS erupted into the American debate over health care when Investors Business Daily, a hard-line right-wing financial publication based in New York, suggested in an editorial that a statist system like Britain’s would have left Stephen Hawking, the Nobel physicist and popular author, to die of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which has afflicted him since he was 21 years old. That ignorant screed prompted Hawking -- who has of course lived in Britain all his life -- to declare that the NHS had saved his life. Furious Britons of all political parties leaped forward to defend their medical system, mocking the dumb American right-wingers and overwhelming Twitter with messages hashmarked “I love the NHS.”
Whatever the marvels and defects of the NHS may be – and most experts agree that it does a superb job despite inadequate funding -- its importance for the debate over American health care reform may be moral rather than practical. Imagine what kind of country we would inhabit if those who claim to represent conservatism in America possessed even a small measure of the human compassion and political decency of Churchill at his best. It is a standard that they do not even attempt to achieve these days.
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about the NHS not the Septics.
Originally Posted by Burnum
