The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
Refuting healthcare myths
-- David Magnus, Phd, is the director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. The views expressed are his own. --
The public discussion of healthcare reform has been full of so many lies and myths that it is less a policy debate than bad theater.
Critics of reform (conservatives hoping to score political points and oppose Obama on anything; free market ideologues; those with threatened financial interests) have stooped to absurdity in their public pronouncements. One publication declared that severely disabled physicist Stephen Hawking would never get life saving medicine in a national health system, ignoring that Hawking is British—virtually all of his life saving treatments were done through their National Health Service.
As debate over reforming health care continues, these are some of the key myths that get in the way of truly meaningful discussion.
from The Great Debate:
Where the healthcare debate seems bizarre
Michael Goldfarb serves as a GlobalPost correspondent in the United Kingdom, where this article first appeared.
In America, the health care debate is about to come to a boil. President Barack Obama has put pressure on both houses of Congress to pass versions of his flagship domestic legislative program prior to their August recess.
