I do find it interesting that it seems much more acceptable in US politics and media to just flat out lie about stuff that doesn’t fit the agenda you want to push and no-one bats an eyelid.
For all I know the IBD might be some back end of nowhere magazine/website and it’s just been picked up on here for the hilarity and blatantness of the lie and received no attention whatsoever in the US outside of the author and his mother but, looking at the last couple of Presidential campaigns for example, it doesn’t seem that uncommon a practice that if you can’t find something factual to say to make your point just make it up and hope no-one notices.
Uk resident here who works for the NHS and I say it’s cracking! But they don’t pay me enough :)
Last year I had a mysterious breathing problem and was sent to a specialist pretty quickly (after a couple of visits with my GP who ummed and arred for a bit) where I was subjected to a battary of tests with various cool machines, this was all done within about a month so very quickly.
Of course the big evil of a National Health System is that if Americans use it they’ll all turn into communists ooogah boogah!
I think recent events have clearly shown the UK politicians to be lying vermin too. They tend to layer their lies in spin though, and are less blatant than “the NHS culls old people!”
Politicians in the UK tend to avoid outright lying, but as you say they are masters of spin. The last really bad lie I remember was Boris saying he hadn’t had an affair outright to his party leader when he in fact had done so. The press, the people and particularly the satirists watch carefully enough that lies are too dangerous but almost reality-warping levels of spin are not.
The whole expenses scandal thing I’m in two minds about. Firstly, it’s a type of fraud. Secondly, front-benchers probably don’t get paid enough. Thirdly, it says something terrible about the state of our politicians. Something that we already knew, something that shouldn’t be a surprise. The scandal was just confirmation, really.
But yes, lying about the NHS is stupid, particularly when he have a high-quality and robust private system too. In fact private hospitals let NHS hospitals use their equipment if the NHS one needs it (the high-tech stuff mostly) and the specialists often work in both.
The last really bad lie I remember was Boris saying he hadn’t had an affair outright to his party leader when he in fact had done so.
I really don’t care about politicians lying about their personal life. It’s nobody’s business but their own. I care when they lie about their actual work.
The last really bad lie I remember was Boris saying he hadn’t had an affair outright to his party leader when he in fact had done so.
I think there’s a slight difference between
“I definitely didn’t have sexual relations with that woman”
and
“See that really famous guy(, who lives in England, and has had 40 years of NHS treatment)? If he was English and lived in England he wouldn’t get treated on the NHS. Do you want that kind of healthcare here?”
I’m certainly not suggesting that UK politics or media are above being at least economical with the truth but I’m struggling to think of anything similar to that or, say, the swiftboat campaign against Kerry as another example off the top of my head.
Spin is one thing and it wouldn’t be too difficult to push the supposed benefits of the US health system over the NHS without resorting to the half-truths and downright lies that they’ve employed to date.
Sure, but when conservatives demonize others for supposed moral failings (eg. homosexuality, extra-marital affairs) then they become liars and hypocrits.
Here in Canuckistan, we Canuckistanis don’t care about our politicians’ personal lives because the politicians don’t bring up their personal lives nor judge others (well, there are some exceptions with the new Conservative Party…).
Pretty much the point I was trying to make. The only reason that was a bad lie was because he lied to his party leader in order to get his party to support him. Of course he had been having an affair so he damaged the reputation of his superiors in supporting him.
If it was just Boris saying “I did not do anything untoward” then I don’t care. As it is it was a petty lie that damaged the reputation of a few people, which is absolutely miles away from “Stephen Hawking would be dead in the UK” which he is in fact not. Like I said, that’s the last lie I remember, everything else is spin and careful wording (which is miles from actually lying, if still unethical).
Anecdote: Stephen Hawking once pushed in front of me in the cinema (Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, probably my favourite cinema). I didn’t care, it was Stephen Hawking and his assistant. I can’t remember what they went to see.
Ah well, the BBC has been having a field day over this. Every time they announce that they got some Republican spokesman or other about to come on and declare how our hospitals are death camps and how we round up disabled people and leave babies to die you can see the reporters almost rubbing their hands in anticipation. I dont think they’re supposed to ask questions like “what studies are you referring to?” or “Where are you getting your figures from?”
My brother worked for 3 years in the US and was insured, but when he had somewhat serious wisdom tooth problems requiring tricky jaw surgery, flying back here for a couple days a few times and paying out of pocket in our private system was cheaper and more convenient than using his insurance there, which is kind of crazy. And our public system would have done it for “free”, but he needed the flexibility of appointments to make the whole thing work without missing too many work days.
I read somewhere a story about the guys tasked with monitoring North Korean radio comms. They told how they routinely heard some of them bragging about how they couldn’t actually be monitored as their superior technology was decades ahead of what eveyone else had, and generally how good they had it in NK, only starving a lot while everyone outside must surely be starving an awful bigger lot.
That’s how the US healthcare debate reads from the outside: a huge case of collective Stockholm Syndrome that turns the issue from very hard to completely impossible to solve.
But Lurb is right, though. That is how the entire debate (not as much on this board) reads. You look in wonder and think “these claims are so easy to verify, so why do people accept so much crazy?”
It’s not like we’re comparing the US system to some remote NK city or that the rest of the Western World is hidden behind an iron curtain and information blackout, so why are so many absolutely unwilling to accept facts. Even supposedly intelligent people like Desslock (I suppose that even in Canadas vastly inferior - to the US - education system it takes brains to pass law school).
That this video even passes for news, even gets on a news channel in the US is an utter, utter disgrace.
Outright lying on national television?
Also, why the need for US news personnel to append the country every time they name a city? “Birmingham, England”: the whole story is about the UK, it’s not going to be Birmingham, Alabama or something. [It’s probably a holdover from having cities with the same name in different states but holy hell, if someone doesn’t know that ‘Paris’ means the one in France then they have big problems]
Addendum: NHS like the Post Office? Our doctors work in practices too.
Why does it always come down to terrorism with the US? Anything the far-right object to comes down to terrorism.
He compares one country with a private system with another with a nationalised system and based on that one data point, concludes terrorism is being incubated in a nationalised healthcare system.
Obviously he ignores the fact that the US is ABOVE the OECD average for foreign born health workers.
Obviously he ignores that major national health care systems like Germany and France have significantly less foreign born workers than the US.
Obviously he ignores the fact that the UK is in the EU and has plenty more foreign born workers in ALL professions. It’s because the UK has been a magnet for workers from all over the EU, and the EU allows for any citizen to work in any other EU country.
That piece was pure, unadulterated political viewpoint masquerading as news.
…compared to around 30% in the uk (from the abstract of this paper on medical migration):
so the base facts underlying the piece make no sense either, the idea that you can somehow slip under the radar at a UK GP’s practice much easier than you could in a small practice in the US is completely insane they are all relatively small practices. Unless he is talking about large hospitals in which case… the US is the same as the UK? The US system isn’t somehow magically harder to hide away terrorists in because it lacks the mystical invisibility powers of bureaucracy.
