Actually there’s enough in your own culture and history of nationalized health care that alarms some people in the U.S. If you’ve had good health care coverage (and the great majority of Americans with private insurance plans feel this way), words like “rationing” raise concern:
*"Leaked documents passed to The Times show that while ministers promise patients choice, a series of barriers are being erected limiting GPs’ rights to refer people to consultants.
The documents reveal that health trusts across London have drawn up plans to establish panels that will “monitor” how many patients are referred to hospital by GPs. Local health trusts have been told that they must cut GP referral rates to those of the lowest 10 per cent nationally. This, the document claims, would save £25 million a year in the capital."*
An editorial from the Times of London reprinted in our local paper today:
*" THERE IS a truth about modern health care that is consistently ignored. Demand will always beat supply.
That is because the demands we have of the service are now out of all alignment with our willingness to pay for them. There are more pensioners than in any previous era and they are living to the ripe ages at which they contract expensively treatable diseases. The genius of health scientists has made more diseases treatable, usually with new drugs that are, at least initially, very expensive. It is not surprising that citizens demand all that can be done. In a public system, every citizen is sensitive to pain and insensitive to price.
At the same time, health care is getting less effective at preventing conditions such as obesity and its associated links with diabetes that are the upshot of dietary and lifestyle choices. Britain’s National Health Service has never really been that. It is a national illness-fixing service. The health of the nation actually has rather little to do with the NHS and that poor correlation is getting worse, to costly effect.
These are serious problems, but the solutions are not hard to enumerate, even if they are difficult to swallow. Health care will have to be rationed further. We can do this by price, by availability or by time. Patients can be charged for some services that are currently free; some elective and noncatastrophic services may have to be excluded; or people will again have to get used to waiting a long time.
It makes no sense to pretend that fully comprehensive health provision can all be funded out of general taxation. … The greatest danger to health care in Britain comes from those false friends who are still pretending that we do not need to change."*
– The Times, London
This is not to say that there isn’t concern and anger over insurance company rationing of some forms of health care, and many Americans see the need to expand coverage and prevent catastrophic illness from economically devastating as many people as it does. But we also know how badly our government can fart up things, and there’s a sense among many that even with Obama’s proposed “limited” expansion of government into health care we are not getting the full story of what to expect and how it will be funded.
So let’s not pretend it’s all a matter of American politics and “culture”.