Again, I've been careless and raising my blood pressure by listening to Fox News. As the debate over government funded healthcare rages, fox news decided to support their ideas by saying the british health system is a disaster as well as the canadian public system. They may as well have attacked my new zealand system because we have a natinal health service.

Naturally they highlighted some individual disasters where people have suffered because of a public system, but it's easy to find examples to suit your argument, both for and against. Do you americans with good health insurance still have bad experiences? Of course you do.

Here in NZ everyone has free hospital healthcare, but if you can afford it you can pay for private healthcare. It seems to work. Whether I work in NZ, Britain, Australia, we all seem to deal with the same problems. We deal with the same people, the nice, the bad, the rich and the dirt poor. We deal with the same conditions, the strokes, the MI's, the trauma. From the american nurses I've worked and shared experiences with, it seems we all end up dealing with exactly the same stuff. 

One thing which is interesting is that waiting times in British ER's are substantially less than that in most American systmes? Fox news didn't bother to mention that.

Anyway, I realise there is a lot more to and against this argument, but that damn Fox News is so bloody frustrating. I haven't actually heard any news from them, only one sided, uninformative and insulting comments to support their own agenda.

 Tell me what it's like to nurse in America.

I'm sure New Zealand is a wonderful place.  Let me ask you an honest question, how many people do you have coming to New Zealand for innovative medical care.  Over my nursing career, I've taken care of people that have come to the United States from all over the world to obtain medical care, because they couldn't get it in their own country.  That includes places with socialized medicine like Canada.  The statistics in this country are that 47 million are uninsured.  Out of that 47 million, 10 million are illegals.   We have a population of over 300 million.  We value freedom and individual choice in this country, we don't like the government making our personal choices.  This medical plan that is being proposed, includes a 'council' of government appointees to decide which 'universal treatments' will work best for the masses.   The newest polling  indicates well over 50% of this country are UNHAPPY with the proposal that's on the table for voting. 

As a matter of fact when I worked in Trauma in Vegas a New Zealand Lady was hit by a car as she stood on the curb, gotta love vegas, anyway she had a badly fractured leg and hip, severe road rash (2nd Degree Burns from the asphalt).  We stablized her and her insurance company in New Zealand was on the phone twice a day to get her ready for air evac back to New Zealand because the cost of our care was exhorbanent.  So much so that it was cheaper to hire a air ambulance and fly her all the way to New Zealand than keep her another 2 weeks in outr hospital.  It was not a private insurance by the way nor a special travel supplement.  It was the national health care system.  They were very concerned about infection and other complications from our US hospitals.  This was in 1987 so you can imagine how much more expensive our care would be now.

In America alot of the innovations and research come from Federal monies as well as private corporations.

Thanks for the replies, very interesting. One point I'd like to make is that I have neither attacked not promoted obama's healthcare plan.  I just think that to attack other national health systems, and to say they are disastrous is very uninformative and inflammatory. In fact I suppose there may even be a few americans frightened by such talk, but then again, all americans are like us new zealanders, and that is informed and above such rhetoric. (little joke there at all of us, not being anti-american)

Also, for your information, I've spent 4yrs in British hospitals and people really do come to Britain from other countries to receive health care, even public healthcare. Britain is also at the forefront of new innovations in healthcare, they've even made a few discoveries in their time (gross understatement by the way).

Oh, as for little old New Zealand, check out Otago University some time. It's where some of the best doctor's in the world come from, as well as some rather useful research is done.

I'm not denying america or americans their claim to the best healthcare in the world and I'm not going into a discussion of who has done the best, or discovered the most. What's the point?