The Washington Post editorial predictably ignores research showing that a single-payer system would save hundreds of billions of dollars—and tens of thousands of lives—each year.
An editorial published on Christmas by the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post inveighed against supporters of Medicare for All in the United States, pointing to the struggles of Britain’s chronically underfunded National Health Service as a “cautionary tale” while ignoring research showing that a single-payer system would save the US hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives each year.
The editorial, headlined “Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter,” laments the “religious-like devotion to the NHS” in the United Kingdom even as “hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as ‘winter.’”
The Post editorial board, led by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, waves away expert analyses showing that the UK government is underinvesting in its healthcare system relative to other countries in Europe, resulting in the kinds of problems the Thursday editorial attributed to the supposedly inherent flaws of single-payer systems.
Conservatives in Britain and Canada continually underfund their national health Care service with the goal of eventually eliminating it. Then conservatives in the United States point at the British healthcare service in say, “Look at that, see it doesn’t work.”
This is literally been the case for the last 30+ years.
Underfunding government services so they break and then using that brokenness as a reason to cut funding further has been the Republican MO for decades.
*Conservative and neoliberal MO
Starving the beast
That’s the case in Portugal too, but both of the two largest parties have been cutting it for years.
Oh yeah the so-called liberals are totally complicit in this farce. All they do is wave their hands and say “this is terrible” and do literally nothing to stop it.