Too busy ‘looking on the bright side of life’?
I am a Brit who lived in America for a number of years and have had experience of both systems, and what I can say is, American healthcare is the best in the world if you are privileged enough to be able to afford it (and we were). Those less fortunate had a much less positive experience. One woman (a mother) couldn’t get psychiatric treatment despite having a history of suicide attempts and severe depression, until my mum asked around a few friends and got her admitted to a research program. One of our neighbours had a heart attack, lost his job and was considered uninsurable, stress which I doubt would have been of much benefit to a man with a potentially fatal heart condition.
In contrast, I have not experienced or personally heard of any instances of abominable treatment of myself or anyone I know within the NHS. The most serious issue we confronted was that some of the nurses were a bit rude on occasion, but apart from that, the treatment was perfectly OK.
It wasn’t in quite the same league as the treatment my sister got in the states when she got pneumonia, with her own private room, games console, TV etc but then, our insurance policy was completely awesome, apart from one little hiccup when the insurance company had to be fought to keep paying for treatment after three days in hospital, which they considered to be more than enough to get over pneumonia! A couple of days later, they had to bring the crash team into her room for fear that she was about to go into cardiac arrest...
Exactly right. Britons are happy with their health service because they know no better. And lets face it, most people do not have regular interactions with hospitals most of the time.