http://www.nursesforreformblog.com/2010/02/09/this-house-would-rather-be-unwell-in-britain-than-america-nfr-speech-to-oxford-union-on-4-february-2010/ The blog for Nurses for Reform, a growing pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-oriented reform of European healthcare systems. Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:50:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://www.nursesforreformblog.com/2010/02/09/this-house-would-rather-be-unwell-in-britain-than-america-nfr-speech-to-oxford-union-on-4-february-2010/comment-page-1/#comment-7969 Neuroskeptic Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:33:14 +0000 http://www.nursesforreformblog.com/?p=490#comment-7969 I'll do a full-blown critique of this later but just for starters - don't you think, when comparing healthcare in Britain and the US, that you should have actually compared healthcare in Britain and the US? Rather than reciting the usual litany of NHS horror stories ("Herceptin!" "Dead babies!" - what I like to call the Daily Mail Gothic genre), and then saying some stuff about the USA, but not actually comparing the two countries on any measures? All this tells us is that you don't like the NHS. We know that. To convince people, you need figures and arguments. There are lots of them out there, few of them favorable to your case, such as that US spending on healthcare is twice ours but their life expectancy is more than 1 year shorter. Hmm. I can see why you don't like numbers, actually. I’ll do a full-blown critique of this later but just for starters – don’t you think, when comparing healthcare in Britain and the US, that you should have actually compared healthcare in Britain and the US? Rather than reciting the usual litany of NHS horror stories (”Herceptin!” “Dead babies!” – what I like to call the Daily Mail Gothic genre), and then saying some stuff about the USA, but not actually comparing the two countries on any measures? All this tells us is that you don’t like the NHS. We know that. To convince people, you need figures and arguments. There are lots of them out there, few of them favorable to your case, such as that US spending on healthcare is twice ours but their life expectancy is more than 1 year shorter. Hmm. I can see why you don’t like numbers, actually.

]]>