Well, I don't know about you but frankly the US Republican right terrify the piss out of me. No sooner did Obama say that he wanted to introduce healthcare reforms due to the generally shit nature of the US healthcare system (if you didn't read my epic blog about the many reasons I don't want to live in America, basically the first thing the US medical care system does if you are bleeding to death is to check what healthcare insurance plan you have. If you can't pay, there's a good chance they might just leave you to die, even if you were six years old) than the loony right, known as 'Republicans' in the US, started gibbering and howling and throwing their own shit at the walls. Well, they didn't, but it's not too far from the truth. Before the first words had settled, the Republicans were throwing that well-known American dirty word 'socialist' around, and denigrating 'socialised healthcare' systems in other countries, such as the well-established ones in Europe. Meffs like Rush Limbaugh, radio presenter and repulsive Republican sycophant who once referred to Obama as 'Barak the Magic Negro', which I think tells you everything you need to know, chaired phone-ins, telling some guy who rung in to say that he had broken his wrist and couldn't afford the $60,000 to fix it that he shouldn't have broken his wrist in the first place. Then some of these god-fearing brain donors came up with some bizarre notion that Obama's reforms would actually lead to 'death panels' where old people would be voluntarily euthanised after signing a living will. And people actually believed it! Sarah Palin actually thinks that Obama wants to kill her disabled baby. But then, Sarah Palin thinks a lot of scary, scary things, because let's face it, dear reader, she is batshit insane.
At the moment, the argument has crossed the Atlantic because the right-wing news networks are attacking the NHS. And to add insult to injury, Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, appeared on a number of news shows agreeing with the bastards and saying things like the NHS was a "60 year mistake" and he "wouldn't wish the NHS on anyone". The most amusing (for us) and ambarrassing (for them) was when Investors Business Daily declared that genius Stephen Hawking would not be alive under the socialist regime of healthcare in the UK because such a totalitarian regime does not value the lives of the disabled. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Stephen Hawkings' reply popped into the editors' inbox saying that actually, he does live in the UK, has done for pretty much all of his life, and without the NHS he probably wouldn't be here today, thankyou very much.
Living in the UK, we know that the NHS isn't perfect; long waiting lists, no money, wards being closed down - but frankly I'd rather have a system full of holes like ours than no system at all, like the US has. At least if I got hit by a car, I know that a paramedic team would try their damndest to scrape me off the road, set my broken bones and put me in hospital, there to be operated on and looked after as necessary. In the US, being an unemployed bum, I would probably be dragged to the side of the road and left to die by the paramedics once they realised I don't have any healthcare insurance. Even if Hannan suddenly fell down some stairs that someone had carelessly greased just before he arrived and fractured his skull on the cunningly placed lead pipe at the bottom of the stairwell, the British NHS would pick him up and nurse him back to health. Although, frankly, given his views, they shouldn't. I personally vote that the NHS should send a high quality photo and, indeed, footage of Hannan making his comments round every A&E department and every paramedic unit in the country with a memo reading; "If you have to treat this man, do not offer any treatment until you have taken his credit card, phoned up to make sure that it is valid, and taken £60,000 out of it directly into the NHS' account. If the card is declined, please ask him to leave the building before he is thrown out." Let him experience the joys of US healthcare that he so clearly loves so much.
Graham Linehan, comedy writer at least partially responsible for many of my favourite comedy shows such as Father Ted, Big Train, The Day Today and Black Books, was so incensed by the Republicans laying into our NHS that he began a Twitter campaign to get #welovetheNHS as a trending topic - and it did. Truckloads of Brits joined in with their messages and positive experiences, and in doing so enlightened the Americans, whose only glimpse of the outside world tends to be through the highly distorting lens of their embarrassingly right wing media; suddenly they saw first hand testimony that socialist health care works far, far better than the frankly inexcusable abomination they have in place in their country that leaves 50 million Americans completely without any healthcare at all.
Sadly, Obama himself is responding to these insane right-wing attacks in the wrong way. Where he should just tell them to put up or shut up and proceed to show the people of the US that he is a leader with balls of steel and he is going to give them what they need, he is instead getting bogged down defending himself over the imaginary 'death panels' - exactly what the senior repulicans want to happen. Drag it out, delay any healthcare reform, and then it will be too late into his term to actually do anything about it. Screw your courage to the sticking point, Obama. Fuck over the bloated, hideous, Hutt-like healthcare insurance companies and the equally grasping, gaspingly overweight pharmaceutical companies that feed off it, and give proper free healthcare to every single American citizen. Make the USA be the envy of the world instead of its current position as 'Global Village Idiot'. You have the power and the money to do it, so don't hold back because of a bunch of retarded little rich boys who refuse to allow any kind of advance in US living conditions on the basis that they or their rich friends might become a little less rich.
At the moment, the argument has crossed the Atlantic because the right-wing news networks are attacking the NHS. And to add insult to injury, Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, appeared on a number of news shows agreeing with the bastards and saying things like the NHS was a "60 year mistake" and he "wouldn't wish the NHS on anyone". The most amusing (for us) and ambarrassing (for them) was when Investors Business Daily declared that genius Stephen Hawking would not be alive under the socialist regime of healthcare in the UK because such a totalitarian regime does not value the lives of the disabled. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Stephen Hawkings' reply popped into the editors' inbox saying that actually, he does live in the UK, has done for pretty much all of his life, and without the NHS he probably wouldn't be here today, thankyou very much.
Living in the UK, we know that the NHS isn't perfect; long waiting lists, no money, wards being closed down - but frankly I'd rather have a system full of holes like ours than no system at all, like the US has. At least if I got hit by a car, I know that a paramedic team would try their damndest to scrape me off the road, set my broken bones and put me in hospital, there to be operated on and looked after as necessary. In the US, being an unemployed bum, I would probably be dragged to the side of the road and left to die by the paramedics once they realised I don't have any healthcare insurance. Even if Hannan suddenly fell down some stairs that someone had carelessly greased just before he arrived and fractured his skull on the cunningly placed lead pipe at the bottom of the stairwell, the British NHS would pick him up and nurse him back to health. Although, frankly, given his views, they shouldn't. I personally vote that the NHS should send a high quality photo and, indeed, footage of Hannan making his comments round every A&E department and every paramedic unit in the country with a memo reading; "If you have to treat this man, do not offer any treatment until you have taken his credit card, phoned up to make sure that it is valid, and taken £60,000 out of it directly into the NHS' account. If the card is declined, please ask him to leave the building before he is thrown out." Let him experience the joys of US healthcare that he so clearly loves so much.
Graham Linehan, comedy writer at least partially responsible for many of my favourite comedy shows such as Father Ted, Big Train, The Day Today and Black Books, was so incensed by the Republicans laying into our NHS that he began a Twitter campaign to get #welovetheNHS as a trending topic - and it did. Truckloads of Brits joined in with their messages and positive experiences, and in doing so enlightened the Americans, whose only glimpse of the outside world tends to be through the highly distorting lens of their embarrassingly right wing media; suddenly they saw first hand testimony that socialist health care works far, far better than the frankly inexcusable abomination they have in place in their country that leaves 50 million Americans completely without any healthcare at all.
Sadly, Obama himself is responding to these insane right-wing attacks in the wrong way. Where he should just tell them to put up or shut up and proceed to show the people of the US that he is a leader with balls of steel and he is going to give them what they need, he is instead getting bogged down defending himself over the imaginary 'death panels' - exactly what the senior repulicans want to happen. Drag it out, delay any healthcare reform, and then it will be too late into his term to actually do anything about it. Screw your courage to the sticking point, Obama. Fuck over the bloated, hideous, Hutt-like healthcare insurance companies and the equally grasping, gaspingly overweight pharmaceutical companies that feed off it, and give proper free healthcare to every single American citizen. Make the USA be the envy of the world instead of its current position as 'Global Village Idiot'. You have the power and the money to do it, so don't hold back because of a bunch of retarded little rich boys who refuse to allow any kind of advance in US living conditions on the basis that they or their rich friends might become a little less rich.
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