Wozza:
You’re thinking in terms of people. A Red Scare. Communists among us like in a bad 1950s movie. You’re not looking at the ideas and assumptions that are baked into society and culture. Ideas like that a “qualified doctor” knows more than some African Catholic immigrant about what is right or wrong. That “us” (the NHS) know better than “them” (immigrants) about what they need. That healthcare is a limited resource that the state needs to control and ration. That people with disabilities are a liability to the state. Those are Marxist ideas in their origin, regardless of how they are labeled or presented today.
Point one: What on earth are the scare quotes doing around the term ‘qualified doctor’? That’s a direct insult to all the men and women who have studied for very many years and work ungodly hours for low wages within the NHS to help people in need.
Point two: They are certainly in a better position to make medical decisions on a young woman who has the mental age of a nine year old then the woman herself. Whether their decision is morally acceptable is another matter and worth debating. But that they are not in a better position to make it is risible.
Point three: The doctors ARE the NHS. Just as the nurses, the orderlies, the cleaners, the office workers are the NHS. To try to slide an extra argument in by claiming that they are entirely different just gives you two bad arguments for the price of one.
Point four: Your claim that it’s the government (via the NHS and hence ‘qualified doctors’) versus immigrants is laughable. Notwithstanding that one in eight people working for the NHS are actually foreign nationals themselves. And there is a significant percentage of people within the NHS that are either not British born or are second generation.
Point five: People with disabilities are the ones that benefit most from a National Health Service (to give it its full name). A system that is enabled by the contributions every single person in the UK makes to it, unless you are unemployed. The amount you pay is dependent on what you earn. The rich pay more. The poor pay less.
Point six: I classed myself from a political stance as someone you might class as a socialist. It seems that anyone who thinks taxation is a good idea brings out the tar and feathers. But if you think support for the NHS makes someone a Marxist, I will proudly claim myself to be one.
