Mad Priest on English health care

Since MP allows folks to nick from him, I am sharing a post he put up today in its entirety. (Really good, Maddy, thank you!).

People in England do lose their jobs.

People in England do have their homes repossessed if they can't pay their mortgage because they are unemployed.

But, when people lose their jobs in England, nothing, absolutely nothing, changes in respect of the healthcare they can expect to receive from the NHS. They still receive exactly the same service as a person still in employment but with the added benefit that they do not have to pay prescription charges for medicines or pay for dental treatment.

Furthermore, when they return to work, they continue with the same full health cover. They do not lose any cover for illnesses they may have developed since they started their previous job. Pre-existing illness and higher risk are not relevant in an universal, public healthcare system.

Therefore, English workers do not have the threat of losing healthcare cover for themselves and their families whilst they are at work. This means that they can change jobs without worries about healthcare provision which results in a more fluid job market which allows capitalism to function in one of the few ways it actually benefits the employee more than the employer. But, more important than this, even, it means that employers do not have a Sword of Damocles to wield over the heads of their employees, allowing them to get away with all sorts of abuse and bad practice in the workplace.

Universal healthcare in the United States would result in a happier workforce which would lead to a more productive and vibrant economy. Therefore, far from being creeping socialism, such a healthcare system could be viewed as a mechanism which allows a market economy to function with more freedom. In other words, a national, single payer healthcare system enables capitalism to do its job for the benefit of all citizens.

--the BB