Prime Minister Gordon Brown has joined a campaign in defence of the state-funded health service as it comes under fire in an increasingly heated debate over US healthcare reform.
Opponents seeking to derail US President Barack Obama's reform plans claim he is bent on a government takeover of private healthcare and some are holding up the National Health Service (NHS) as a warning of what could befall America.
An editorial in one newspaper claimed that astrophysicist Stephen Hawking would have never survived if treated here -- before retracting its position when it realised he is British and a big fan of the NHS.
A Republican senator also reportedly remarked recently that US Senator Ted Kennedy might have been refused treatment for his brain tumour on the NHS.
Obama has hit out at "scare tactics" adopted by opponents who brand his plans "socialism". In Britain, leading figures have been quick to defend the NHS as it becomes embroiled in the row.
Brown added his voice Thursday to a campaign on micro-blogging website Twitter entitled "We love the NHS".
"The NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death. Thanks for always being there," the prime minister said via his Downing Street office's official Twitter account.
His wife Sarah has also added her own message and health secretary Andy Burnham said it was "an institution I will defend to my dying day".
Set up in 1948, the tax-funded NHS has grown up to become the largest publicly funded health service in the world. While Britons love to grumble about its flaws, most are fiercely defensive of free-to-access healthcare.
But for many critics in the United States, it represents a bureaucratic, costly nightmare under which patients have no real choice and receive a poor quality of care.
An editorial in Investor's Business Daily this week declared: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK where the National Health Service would say the quality of life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
It later admitted this was a "bad example", and the British scientist -- who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease -- has responded with a firm defence of his treatment.
"I wouldn't be here if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived," he told the Guardian newspaper earlier this week.
Conservatives for Patient Rights (CPR) is a lobby group that has paraded disgruntled NHS patients on US television, complaining that there is no money for the latest cancer drugs.
And Republican Senator Chuck Grassley was also reported to have attacked the NHS, suggesting that fellow Senator Kennedy may not have been treated in Britain because of his age.
The chairman of the British Medical Association, Hamish Meldrum, condemned the statements about the NHS as "jaw-droppingly untruthful", and the health ministry has rejected many of the claims made the other side of the Atlantic.
"The NHS sees one million people every 36 hours and 93 percent of patients rate their care as good or excellent," a spokeswoman said, saying there had been record levels of invesment in recent years.
She also rejected claims the NHS discriminates on age, saying it operated on the basis of clinical need.
"Whether to prescribe drugs or recommend a type of treatment or surgery is, quite rightly, a clinical decision taken on a case by case basis and together with a patient and their family based on all of the available evidence."
Source: AFP European Edition
