Image: A queue in the former USSR
As an American, I have followed the debate about the future of the National Health Service with curious fascination. I must say I don’t entirely understand why this has even become a question – why anyone seriously thinks that privatizing the NHS would be a good idea, or why we have to resort to citizen campaigns simply in order to keep it around. As far as I can tell, the NHS is one of the best things Britain has going for it, and it would be a monumental step backward to let it go.
I haven’t always held these views. Being on the left, I have long been committed to the principle of socialized healthcare, but, like most of my countrymen, I secretly suspected that such a system could never really work in practice. Before I moved to London in 2011, I had visions of the NHS as a quagmire of forms, queues, and long waiting times. These assumptions affect US progressives as much as they do devotees of Fox News: they’re in the water, part of the commonsense furniture of everyday life. Somehow we all end up believing that America’s private, for-profit healthcare system is our only hope, and without it we’re likely to end up dying while waiting in line for basic treatment. For most Americans, the specter of socialized healthcare – and of the NHS in particular – looms like the heavy shadow of Russian bureaucracy in a Gogol novel.
