Great Britain is Getting Hammered By the CoronaVirus

Germany is an excellent example of why the US should want government run healthcare. Their hospitals are well funded and have plenty beds available.

Universal healthcare differs very much from country to country. The US could get the best out of different universal healthcare systems.



https://www.dkv.global/covid

 

The system in Germany is still based on insurance companies and not all are run by the govt like the UK. The United States has one good example of why they couldn't manage a healthcare system. It's called the Veteran's Administration. They killed thousand and nobody went to jail. It's been hosed for decades. Everyone knew it and nobody did anything about it until Trump was elected. I don't trust any govt to run my healthcare.

 

All three links are 2 years old and have nothing to do with the text you highlighted. One of the links is an analysis to a potential shortfall and one mentions an addition £20B in funding.

If you Google US hospitals and money crisis and there are loads of links about hospital on the brink of financial ruin. You can contrast this to the UK government clearing all hospital debt, while in the US there are warnings that insurance premiums will be going up to cover the costs.

https://hbr.org/2020/03/coronavirus-is-exposing-deficiencies-in-u-s-health-care

You misunderstood, no patients have been turned away, they were stopping new volunteers because they had too many people trying to sign up to help.

Nothing you’ve posted shows how well or badly the NHS is performing in this crisis.

 

You're absolutly right. I just wanted to be polemic. The German system is a mixed system but the government still has a fundamentel leverage and we could be far better using our money. In 1988 ( I was 15) I was treated in a British hospital and it was like being in a movie from the 1950's. In 2008 I was in a US hospital and the treatment was excellent but the invoice was a impertinence.

 

A number of reasons I expect. We don't have the same level of political divisiveness in the UK and so there is much less partisan gamesmanship to feed attacks on various politicians. We hold them all in pretty much equal contempt, with individual popularity or unpopularity based more on (perceived) character than party membership. We also have a less centralised government, both nationally and locally, so there aren't the big figureheads to be the focus of attacks and in general we tend to attack government and authority in general.

There is also the fact that we don't have Trump. While we have our bad politicians, they're generally bad by not saying anything to avoid any controversy and so rarely trigger big reactions. Trump specifically (and some other US politicians) seem to go the other way, with much more abrasive and aggressive approaches which stirs up more controversy and makes more noise.

Our media is somewhat different, with newspapers (albeit largely online) still being the primary news source rather than television in the US. Written news is always going to be (at least a little) less showy and attention grabbing and therefore less likely to trigger those big, knee-jerk reactions.

Another aspect would be that this kind of forum isn't going to be a primary focus of British commentary so you won't necessarily hear about what is being discussed in the UK, certainly not to the extent that we hear about the US. On a related note, we're a much smaller population. 1% of Americans complaining will have much more impact than 1% of Brits just on raw numbers alone.

The stereotype of stoicism is, while exaggerated like all stereotypes, is somewhat true of Brits. We tend not to make grand gestures or lots of noise about things but that doesn't mean there aren't lots of quite complaints flying around. Again, you just won't hear about them.

I can't tell you what I think about your free-speech comment because I don't have the freedom to on this American-run forum.

 

Now that is an outstanding reply! Thank you.

 

I looked for links that were older to show that this isn't something new. The virus is only a couple of months old. The UK health system has been screwed up for years.