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'Evil and Orwellian' – America's right turns its fire on NHS | World news | The Guardian

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'Evil and Orwellian' – America's right turns its fire on NHS | World news | The Guardian
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The National Health Service has become the butt of increasingly outlandish political attacks in the US as Republicans and conservative campaigners rail against Britain's "socialist" system as part of a tussle to defeat Barack Obama's proposals for broader government involvement in healthcare.

Top-ranking Republicans have joined bloggers and well-funded free market organisations in scorning the NHS for its waiting lists and for "rationing" the availability of expensive treatments.

As myths and half-truths circulate, British diplomats in the US are treading a delicate line in correcting falsehoods while trying to stay out of a vicious domestic dogfight over the future of American health policy.

Slickly produced television advertisements trumpet the alleged failures of the NHS's 61-year tradition of tax-funded healthcare. To the dismay of British healthcare professionals, US critics have accused the service of putting an "Orwellian" financial cap on the value on human life, of allowing elderly people to die untreated and, in one case, for driving a despairing dental patient to mend his teeth with superglue.

Having seen his approval ratings drop, Obama is seeking to counter this conservative onslaught by taking his message to the public, with a "town hall" meeting today at a school in New Hampshire.

Last week, the most senior Republican on the Senate finance committee, Chuck Grassley, took NHS-baiting to a newly emotive level by claiming that his ailing Democratic colleague, Edward Kennedy, would be left to die untreated from a brain tumour in Britain on the grounds that he would be considered too old to deserve treatment.

"I don't know for sure," said Grassley. "But I've heard several senators say that Ted Kennedy with a brain tumour, being 77 years old as opposed to being 37 years ...

Original URL
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/11/nhs-united-states-republican-health

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    • Jard and Roberta DeVille Jard and Roberta DeVille
      6 months ago


      Of course, these are outright lies the American right is propagating about the NHS. They do this to confuse and divide the American people with no regard for the Truth or Facts. Undoubtedly, 'Faux News" is the worst. Behind these lies are spiritually bankrupt manipulators, who are creating their own selfish empire, are wicked flag waving and psalm singing frauds. These users and abusers have already orchestrated the theft of America’s wealth. The richest one percent of Americans already control ninety percent of the nation’s wealth, are now ripping the last ten percent from the rest of us. Of course, many of these abusers cannot help themselves without intensive psychotherapy -- their narcissistic yearning for wealth, power and privilege reveals a throbbing neuroticism that borders on psychopathy. People who are wounded so deeply psychologically and spiritually that they cannot support and trust anyone except a superior class of aristocrats that God supposedly loves best, before whom the poor plebes of society must kneel humbly, are deliberately creating a work force of obedient serfs. Obviously, every loyal American should oppose the wicked triad of abusers who are devouring the affluent middle class and creating an obscenely wealthy minority at the expense of an increasingly large mass of poor peasants for whom blood, toil, tears and sweat have become their daily fare.

      In a recent speech, Bill Moyers reported that the users and abusers of America are propagandizing naïve Americans with a flood of misinformation, are lying constantly to convince us that global capitalism and the resultant collapse of the middle class and the rise of a ruthless American Empire - are the result of natural economic forces. The greedy robber barons insist that the new American economic system, developing without a corresponding increase in decent jobs or livable wages, is another step in the upward and onward march of a laissez faire free market that raises all boats equitably. Their always clever spin doctors counsel us to be patient, to trust their vassal economists who understand these complex issues better than we the middle class dolts. In time, perhaps decades of poverty, a new generation of American workers may recover some of their lost affluence and shall revere the names of the wealthy aristocrats who brought them the benefits of globalized capitalism with a few obscenely wealthy winners and a great host of financial losers. They shall have recreated a new empire of lords and laborers in the manner of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, Mings, Romanovs, Mayas and the Windsors. Everything important that the founding fathers of our Republic labored so hard to create will be lost.

      As Moyers said about the robber barons’ propaganda blitz to persuade people to sacrifice themselves in order to enrich the ruthless cabal, this mind-bending assault is all a fraud. To which I add - This destruction of the American Republic through the crippling of the middle class has been carefully orchestrated. There is nothing the least bit natural about it, for it destroys the very purpose of civilized living -- the protection of its people from the vicissitudes of nature and from the always greedy nobles who are determined to steal everything they can carry away. The robber barons’ scheme returns us to the law of the jungle, to a society in which might makes right and the majority of people are used and abused to benefit the rich and ruthless. The resulting loss of medical care, raiding of Social Security, the explosion of homelessness, poor public education and ever declining decent jobs, is the result of clever planning by cynical administrations from President Reagan to Bush that served the robber barons and greedy corporations. American's people must now get down in the trenches an fight for our lives with the Truth. CLICK Here to help http://www.patriotmajority.us/ keep a public option.
      Healthcare Policy in the United States, Health Care Reform in America, Public Policy, Cool, Food For Thought, Politics, *Changing America?
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