What a Great Thing to Celebrate

Published at 22:51 on 14 August 2012

Yeah, I’m more than a little slow here. So sue me. I don’t watch TV. I saw a picture in the print media showing a scene with what looked like hospital beds at the Olympics opening ceremony, thought that odd, and made a mental note to investigate. I only just now got around to investigating.

So it was only this evening that I found out what that whole scene was about. Britain is an old country, far older than the USA, so they had a lot of picking and choosing to do when it came to things about their country to celebrate in the opening ceremony. And one of those things they celebrated was making health care available to all, regardless of circumstances.

Sure, the NHS has its problems. And the corporate media in the USA never tires of reporting them. What they don’t report are the successes. Such as Britain’s remarkable accomplishment in achieving less inequality in health access than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

And mind you, they do so at first-world standards. This isn’t an equalizing downward like they have in, say, Cuba. In fact, Britain has better infant mortality and life expectancy statistics than the USA.

And how much does all of this generosity this cost? One of the lowest per-capita costs in the developed world. (Probably a little too low, in fact: if Britain spent more, it could be at the top of health statistics, instead of 10 or 15 slots down from the top like they are.)

Back to the corporate media for a moment. You hear so little of the NHS’s successes in the US media that even columnists in erstwhile left-leaning publications are left puzzling over why the British would want to celebrate the NHS. And that is part of why politics in the USA is so divorced from any sense of reality: even the Left in many cases buys into all-pervasive right-wing lies and misinformation.

But I digress. Instead of only celebrating mindless garbage like war and conquest, Britain chose to celebrate a major accomplishment in creating a more just society for all. That’s pretty remarkable.

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