"Sicko", sicker, sickest?

Thursday, 9th August 2007

Given that you can´t trust a single word he says, I´ll probably give Michael Moore´s latest film a miss. I notice, though, that one of Andrew Sullivan´s guest-bloggers, columnist Liz Mair, has written a response which includes the claim that:

No matter how great socialized medicine may sound, the best that it achieves is dishing up very poor care for all, as opposed to good care for all, or even most.

Er, really? Stephen P. knows a lot more about the nuts and bolts than I do. All I´ll say is I´ve experienced the good and the bad sides of the NHS. The treatment I had for a nagging shoulder injury bordered on the farcical – three ops, lost notes, contradictory diagnoses, an ever-elusive consultant and, towards the end, an encounter with a house-doctor who insisted that one of operations I´d had couldn´t actually have taken place because my shoulder didn´t show the “right” marks. (My notes had been lost again, so he had to go with his instincts.)

On the other hand, our GP is very good, my wife received excellent ante- and post-natal care with our three sons, and one of them has had brilliant treatment for a heart condition. When he had a pacemaker fitted at Gt Ormond St last year, we began chatting to the much-travelled parents next to us in the waiting room, and discovered that, although extremely wealthy (we´re talking multi-millions), they chose to use the NHS because an up-market US hospital had botched the previous heart op. Make of that what you will.

As far as US-UK comparisons are concerned, I previously recommended this David Asman op-ed over at my old blog:

"Mr. Asman, could you come down to the gym? Your wife appears to be having a small problem." In typical British understatement, this was the first word I received of my wife's stroke.

Well worth a read if you haven´t seen it before. What makes it particularly interesting is that it´s written by a Fox News reporter with personal experience of coming face to face with doctors in New York and London . Despite the headline - There´s No Place Like Home - he sees weaknesses, and strengths, on both sides.

Another article worth pondering is by my friend Jesse Larner, author of a fine, no-holds-barred biography of Moore. As regular readers of this site will know, Jesse is a man of the Left, but still doesn´t have time for Moore´s blatant distortions. (That´s probably one reason why his book won so little attention from the mainstream media.) He has written an essay on the health debate on his Huffington Post blog:

Despite all the problems with the various flavors of socialized medicine throughout the democratic developed world, by many measures we in the do not have the best health care system in the world. We have the best medical research. We have the most advanced technology. We have the best doctors. But in terms of access and overall results, as measured by the World Health Organization using standards developed by an international team of health care professionals, the comes in seventeenth, behind all the major European countries and ( is first.) Don't worry, the is Number One in health care spending per capita.

[Correction: When I was writing the original version of this post, I mis-read the opening lines of Jesse's article. I thought he hadn't yet seen the film.]