Trump NHS Tweet Angers Brits Fearing U.S.-Style Health Care

During the Brexit referendum in 2016, one of the key messages of the Leave campaign was to repatriate money from Brussels and spend it on the NHS. And perhaps to the bafflement of the global audience, it even featured in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, with a choreographed segment that included patients on hospital trollies.

While part of the U.K. disgruntlement stems from perceived under-funding of the NHS, protesters also are anxious about creeping privatization of the service. Data from the King’s Fund charity show that 7.7% of the service’s budget went toward private services in the 2016-2017 tax year, up from 7.3% two years earlier. That’s consistent “with longer-term gradual increases over the past 15 years,” it said.

‘Broken System’

“We are marching because we love our universal healthcare and we don’t want it to end up like YOUR broken system,” wrote Twitter user EL4C, whose profile links through to a YouTube channel called Ealing Labour for Corbyn, indicating support for Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn himself tweeted that Trump was wrong: “People were marching because we love our NHS and hate what the Tories are doing to it. Healthcare is a human right.”

Within two hours of Trump’s tweet, there were more than 10,000 responses to it. In a Twitter poll set up by Financial Times journalist Jim Pickard pitting the two countries’ health care systems against each other, 90% of those who voted preferred the British system.

The London protests followed a Labour Party rally on Jan. 25 in which Corbyn and his health spokesman, Jonathan Ashworth, called for an emergency budget to end a winter crisis in the NHS that’s seen more than 116,000 people stuck for more than half an hour in ambulances, waiting for hospital beds to free up.

And indeed, Britons expressed little support for how their Conservative government was handling the NHS issue. A tweeter names Katherine Fenton wrote:

“The NHS is failing because it is being starved of funds by our govt who all have links to private healthcare companies and seem to think that the American system is the way to go…..kerching! That is why we were protesting, because we would like to keep our universal healthcare.”

— Read Quebec Seeks Competitive Bids on Drugs After Talks Collapse on ThinkAdvisor.

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