Britons rally to defend their healthcare system, say U.S. attacks aren't cricket

Britain's National Health Service treats 1 million patients every 36 hours, employs 1.5 million people and operates with a budget of about $169 billion, according to official statistics. (Alastair Grant / Associated Press)

It's one thing for the British to criticize their National Health Service, quite another for Yanks to malign it. A backlash against U.S. criticism has erupted in cyberspace.

By Henry Chu
LA Times
August 15, 2009
Reporting from London

Castigating their public healthcare system may be a national pastime for the British, but it's not one they care to share with Americans, thank you very much.

In fact, Britain's oft-maligned National Health Service on Friday was on the receiving end of an outpouring of love and affection it hasn't felt in years, owing to a growing backlash against what many here see as lies and calumnies being spread about the NHS by conservative critics of President Obama's plan for healthcare changes in the United States.

Those critics have branded the NHS as "evil" and "Orwellian," an example of socialized medicine to be avoided at all costs. They blast the system, which offers free healthcare to all, as an expensive failure that denies new drugs to cancer victims, blocks the elderly from receiving certain kinds of treatment and generally puts a low value on human life.

But such allegations have set the blood boiling in many Britons, who this week hit back in the blogosphere, in print and over the airwaves to defend one of their country's most jealously guarded institutions from an unexpected attack from across the pond.

(More here.)