One of the key divisions between the left-wing Democratic Party and the right-wing Republican Party in the United States is that the Democrats want Universal Healthcare like we have, so that poor people can get the medicare they need and thousands of American people wouldn’t die needlessly every year, just because they don’t have insurance, and the Republicans want the medical industry to remain first and foremost a business that operates to make money and not to help people.
Now, Republican US President Donald Trump has recently spoken out against the NHS – our universal healthcare organisation in Britain that is funded by the government and provides medicare to the people of Britain free of charge – as it’s been protested by unhappy patrons.
The President has criticised the NHS as failing, after which Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, publicly spoke out in disagreement with this statement.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, who usually tends to avoid being critical of Trump in order to preserve the so-called “special relationship” between the UK and the US, came forward to support Hunt’s claims and also subtly condemn Trump for his own comments. America’s understanding of the universal healthcare system in the UK is pretty limited, especially from some like Trump, so these comments were misguided from the get-go.
Trump used NHS comparison to slam Democrats’ universal healthcare plan
Trump didn’t just start having a go at the NHS out of the blue.
It was brought on by the Democrats’ recently announced plan for a system of universal healthcare for America. The President doesn’t like the idea of universal healthcare, as his priorities lie more in helping big business and caring about privileged white people such as himself above everyone else who struggles to afford health insurance.
If it’s not a problem for his family, then in his eyes, it’s not a problem for America. That’s usually the way it goes.
Since the Democrats were “pushing for universal healthcare” in the United States, Trump decided to remind them that “thousands of people” are protesting the NHS, because it is – in his words – “going broke and not working.” However, the protests that he is referring to are not about the failings of the NHS – they’re about how Brexit will result in the NHS having to be shut down.
There are picket signs and all that jazz where they’re saying that the British government is faced with a “choice” between Brexit and the NHS – they can’t have both, apparently. That’s what the protests are about. It’s not about the NHS “not working.”
Yet again, Trump didn’t think before he spoke
Once again, like with the Britain First retweets (that was the last time that May spoke out to criticise Trump), the President is going off on one and doing something or saying something impulsively without all the proper background knowledge to support his outlandish claims. Trump claimed in his tweet (although he prefers the term “social media” to “tweeting,” for some reason or another) that the Democrats’ universal healthcare plan will result in “greatly rais[ing] taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care.” He concluded, “No thanks!”
Jeremy Hunt’s response to Trump’s comments was that none of the protestors (in the words “not ONE of them,” to be exact) want to live in a country where a grand total of 28 million people are left completely without health coverage, which is a sly nod to the dire situation across the pond in America. Hunt added that, in the UK, everybody receives healthcare “no matter the size of their bank balance,” and said that he’s “proud” to be from the UK, where universal healthcare was pioneered.
