American healthcare is not medical Nirvana

You can tell a lot about a country's aspirations and view of itself from soap television. Consider the working class struggle and booze-fest depicted in Britain's Eastenders against the middle-class consumerist angst in something like America's Bold and the Beautiful.

So when it comes to healthcare, a noisy American debate that has suddenly dragged Britain's poor old National Health Service into the transatlantic limelight, you can compare the underfunded, scruffiness of Britain's Holby City with the pristine efficiency of America's Private Practice. (Is no one ugly in American healthcare?).

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Private Practice is what America thinks its healthcare is all about. But it isn't. Most Americans who are lucky enough to have health insurance do not generally get anything like the top-notch treatment as touted by the medical profession, free-market right and drug companies.

They may be like my family was, limited to HMOs who tell you who you can see and for what, yelling at you for taking a sick child to the "wrong" hospital. Or they may be like a dear, now-departed old man I knew who was bounced from one expensive specialist to another for years being misdiagnosed while Medicare picked up his bills.

If they live in a small, poor town in rural America, they will be lucky if they get more than a local pill-pusher and county hospital with limited facilities. But that can even happen in cities too.

So don't buy the argument that a new America healthcare system will somehow destroy medical Nirvana. It is already a mess for most people.

Now none of this is to say that Britain's NHS is perfect. It is just as scruffy, overworked and understaffed as Holby City portrays. It also makes plenty of mistakes and can be an incompetent bureaucratic nightmare.

But it has one thing going for it that American healthcare does not. It is there and anyone can use it. There are no fears in Britain of growing old and not having medical coverage. Health insurance is not even an afterthought if you get laid off or your business goes under.

Like publicly funded schools it is there to serve you. Like the publicly funded military it is there to protect you.

Give me Holby City over Private Practice any time -- although I wouldn't mind the odd Addison Montgomery wondering around NHS the wards.