Britain From A to Z: Z

Zeitgeist

I admit that it took me a while to decide what Z topic to talk about. My initial thought was to make the topic Zebra Crossing, which is a striped speed bump seen throughout the UK. I was going to simply show the photo below and leave it at that.

I later decided I wanted a bit more substance, but was having a hard time coming up with a Z word that had any relevance to my Britain trip. Ultimately I settled on Zeitgeist.

For those that don’t know, zeitgeist means “spirit of the age” or “spirit of the time”. It refers to the dominant school of thought that influences the culture of a particular place at a particular time. In this post I will be concentrating on the prevailing British zeitgeist as it relates to freedom.

While traveling across Scotland, England, and Wales, my sense was that I was in a free country. Our tour bus traveled about without governmental checks. We had to show our passports upon our initial entry into the country in Glasgow, Scotland, but I do not recall having to show them ever again, even when crossing borders into England and Wales. We traveled across a lot of rural areas and visited quite a few urban areas. Mostly, I felt about the same as I do when traveling across the United States. The main difference I observed was the accents.

Despite the overall decline of freedom around the world over the last few years, Freedom House still lists the UK and the US as free countries. When it comes to economic freedom, the US has been declining rather quickly. We are now no longer listed among the Free nations. Rather, we are listed as Mostly Free by The Heritage Foundation. Only six countries are listed as free. The US is now at number 12. The UK is slightly less free at number 14. It is sad to me to see countries like Chile and Estonia being ranked higher in economic freedom than the US.

Two social areas of freedom of interest to me are gun control and healthcare.

Here in the US, gun control has been a topic of hot debate for many years. Some would like to outright ban guns for ordinary citizens, only allowing the police and the military to have them. Others point out that criminals would still have guns even if they were all banned. Therefore, as long as the criminals have them, honest citizens need them for protection. From what I have read, Britain is further down the road on banning guns. They are still available, but my understanding is that it is more difficult to get a permit there than in the US as a whole. In fact, when we met Baron Dafydd Wigley in Wales (see my post on Xenophobia), one of the things he said was that the Brits simply don’t understand the US’s lax position on gun control.

Another area where Britain is further along the social trail is healthcare. Publicly funded healthcare has been around for years now. Interestingly, several people I encountered seemed to not like this. They pointed out how those with enough money also bought private insurance because the public system was inadequate in some ways. I think the biggest issue is the waiting time for certain tests and procedures. This is similar to some of the complaints coming out of Canada. While every Canadian I’ve talked to about their healthcare seem to like it, there are those times when Canadians have to travel to the US to get a test sooner than their system allows so that any necessary treatments can begin earlier rather than later.

Let us hope that in the midst of Britain, the US, and other free countries moving more and more down the socialist path, we will love freedom enough to stop before we lose control of our lives as has happened in too many countries around the world. 

US vs Canada on Healthcare

It's hard to believe it has been over a month since my last post. Time sure slips away, especially around the holidays.

I have written recently about different perspectives on Canadian healthcare. Well, a few days ago I ran across an article that summarizes a 2007 study comparing American and Canadian healthcare. The original paper was a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S. The summary I read can be found in a recent Laissez Faire book catalog. See page 12.

Canadian Healthcare System

A few days ago I sent a link to many friends and family of a story that John Stossel did on 20/20 about government healthcare in Canada. In this story, Stossel paints a pretty grim picture of that country’s healthcare system, with long lines having waits up to 23 hours and delays in getting critical care. I thought it an important message worthy of being viewed by many others, thus the reason for sending the link.

On Saturday night, my family and I went to a party celebrating a friend’s 40th birthday. Some friends of his that live in Canada came down for the event. As people left and the remaining people congregated into one room, I was itching to ask them for their personal perspective of their country’s healthcare. Eventually, someone broached the subject and I took advantage of it. I asked, “What do you think of Canada’s healthcare system?” Immediately one of the visitors threw his hand up into the air with his thumb extended even higher and said, “I give it a thumbs up.”

Over the next hour or so a very interesting conversation ensued and I was able to find out more about the Canadian health system first hand from three residents of that country. All three agreed that their system was working very well. Not perfect, as no system is perfect, but well. They admitted that it had had its problems in the past, but over the last 25 years the system had been tweaked and was now running quite efficiently. I was told that families pay about $108 per month for insurance (yes, insurance companies still exist and the government works with them) and the government kicks in about 12% of the country’s GDP. By way of contrast, the USA is estimated to spend a total of 17% of GDP. One person said that the most she had ever waited to see a doctor was about two hours. Another said he had waited longer, but generally it was not a problem. He did say that the waits might be longer in rural areas where there are limited healthcare facilities. The full cost of any medical care is paid by the insurance; not even a co-pay is required.

The Canadian population is low enough that some newer or more advanced medical tests and treatments are sometimes not available. In these circumstances, the insurance will pay for the patient and his or her family to visit the United States for service.

Knowing that many US citizens are concerned about socialized medicine leading to rationing and a defunding of general research, I inquired about these things. They responded that they had not seen any rationing happening. They further said that much medical research was being conducted in conjunction with universities.

Wow! And double WOW! How is it possible that these personal experiences with the Canadian healthcare system are so radically different than what was reported by John Stossel? Was I being fed a line by brainwashed Canadians? I really don’t think so. They all seemed like good people with sincere stories about how medicine operates in their country. Was Stossel being dishonest in this report? I don’t believe that either. I suspect that Stossel’s stories, to be provocative and entertaining, focused on the worst experiences of our northern neighbors. My friend’s friends were telling the story from the trenches. Let’s just hope that if some form of government-run healthcare passes in the US, it will work reasonably well, not become politicized, and improve over the coming years.

For a report validating much of what I heard from the Canadians, look at this:

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/mythbusting-canadian-health-care-part-i