Right, well, over here in the real world people live longer and are healthier in the UK than they are in the US. Infant mortality is appreciably lower in the UK than in the US, as Cheezy already told you. You can ferret out some article that has some anecdote about some person who had some thing stuck in her, but you could anywhere. Doctors make mistakes no matter where they work or what the system is. The NHS is not perfect. Far from it. But it works and it is massively popular. It has worked for over sixty years, and as I said, no mainstream politician in the UK would ever dream of abolishing it - even Thatcher didn't do that. Why do you suppose that is? Would you call Margaret Thatcher a "leftist"?
Now you may, if you wish, say that you are opposed to the NHS or similar government-run healthcare for ideological reasons. (Personally I would consider it rather immoral to think that dogma is more important than people's health and wellbeing, but there you go.) But don't try to pretend that the NHS and similar schemes are detrimental to people's health. Because that's just closing your eyes and ignoring the facts.
I'm not going to argue with you about whether the NHS is a good thing or a bad thing here. This is partly because there is no argument whatsoever to be had - the facts clearly indicate that it is a good thing, end of story - and partly because this is not the subject of this thread. It's supposed to be about political attitudes, not the desirability or otherwise of certain policies. However, your comments about this issue illustrate perfectly one of the reasons why the US is so out of kilter with other countries. It seems to me that many Americans live in a sort of bubble, in which only America is really real; not only do they not know anything about how the rest of the world works, they seem almost not to believe that the rest of the world exists. They conceive of issues such as socialised healthcare only as abstract ideas, not as concrete realities that have been around for decades. They argue about these things on the basis of how they imagine they would work if they were put into practice, without thinking about how they actually do work and have worked for decades. Your comments about the NHS are a perfect example. You're convinced that it doesn't work not because of the evidence or because you know anything about Britain (which you continue to refer to as "England"). You're convinced that it doesn't work for purely dogmatic reasons.
(And when I say "many Americans" there, I have to say that it always seems to be the more right-wing ones who give this impression. Of course this is just my impression. I could be completely wrong.)
So the real issue is why this is the case.
Again, this is dogma, plain and simple. It is not fact, or even well informed opinion.
Incidentally, if you really think that the NHS kills people, and yet you say you don't care, then that is morally abhorrent.
