Horrors of rationed UK health care used in ad against Obama scheme

Guardian:

The US healthcare establishment has launched a series of television attack adverts using tragic stories from Britain's National Health Service to contest Barack Obama's plans to contain the escalating cost of treatment and make it more accessible to the poor.

In the broadcasts, by Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR), Britons complain about waiting times, restrictions to operations and access to life-saving drugs on the NHS. A top British cancer specialist, Dr Karol Sikora, dean of the University of Buckingham's medical school and former chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme, also appears, warning that a state-run system strips patients of control over their healthcare. "They lose control over their own destiny in the health system," he says in the advert.

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The latest campaign is being co-ordinated by the same public relations firm that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks by President Bush's campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election.

CPR says that Obama's plans to control costs, while widening access to care for some 45m people without health insurance, means that the US will introduce rationing of treatment and drug supplies which is similar to that overseen by the UK's National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence (Nice).

The campaign group describes Britons as "trapped" by the NHS, with medical decisions made by bureaucrats, not doctors. "As our nation goes forward in its own healthcare reform debate, the failures of the British system should have Americans asking some very important questions, such as: who should make medical decisions – me and my doctor or a government board?" CPR asks.

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The story contains a factual error about the Swift vets campaign which had nothing to do with the Bush campaign. Perhaps UK liberals do not understand the ability of independent people to express their opinion in a campaign in the US. Nor is it fair to say that this is a campaign by the "healthcare establishment."

What is fair is to hold up the NHS as a failed system of rationed health care. It is one that in Scotland has seen elderly patients dying of malnutrition, i.e. they were starved. That is certainly one way of reducing health care cost.

It would take more than a few ads to document all of the horrors of rationed health care in the UK and Canada.

I haven't seen the ads and the story did not link any YouTube's of the ads. Since I watch Special Report on Fox News I get to see a lot of ads for "Free Credit Report" and for ambulance chasing lawyers seeking patients who have "suffered" various illness as a results of "defective products." They are all terrible ads, and I would prefer to see one slamming rationed health care.