Sunday, July 29, 2012
The International Olympic Committee decided not to
include in the opening ceremony a moment of silence to honor the eleven Israeli
athletes killed by Palestinian gunmen during the 1972 games in Munich. That
move drew the ire of NBC’s Bob Costas. During Friday’s ceremony, he commented
that, although a private moment of silence was held before a mere 100 people
this week at the Athlete’s Village, “for many, tonight, with the world
watching, is the true time and place to remember those who were lost and how and
why they died.”
Instead, the Olympic ceremony featured a weird,
politically correct extravaganza by film director Danny Boyle (Slumdog
Millionaire). It was hailed by the sports website The Roar with the headline
“London 2012: Most political Olympics opening ceremony since Berlin 1936.” The
1936 games, of course, were an infamous propaganda exercise for Adolf Hitler.
For The Roar’s Spiro Zanos, “the political message at
London was that Britain could recover its greatness and become Great Britain
once again if . . . [it] re-embraced the radical politics that unleashed the
industrial revolution and the welfare state. . . . If this means having the
most political opening ceremony since the Berlin Olympics in 1936, then so be
it.” The state-worship so ably skewered by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism is
alive and well.
The Boyle ceremony got underway with images of a bucolic
Britain being swept away by a cigar-chomping elite that builds satanic mills
filled with oppressed workers as steeplejacks hang from the towering chimneys.
Later, 600 doctors and patients recruited from National Health Service
hospitals were featured in a bizarre tribute to socialized medicine, with
children bouncing up and down on 320 hospital beds arrayed in front of a giant
Franken-baby wrapped in bandages. Villains from British children’s literature,
ranging from Cruella de Vil to Lord Voldemort, sweep in on the children, in an
apparent reference to conservative forces seeking to reform the tottering NHS.
The 15-minute sequence ended with a series of red lights triumphantly spelling
out “NHS.”
Left-wingers were thrilled. “Brilliant that we got a
socialist to do the opening ceremony,” tweeted Alastair Campbell, former
communications chief for the Labour party. Boyle denied he was promoting a
political agenda. “The sensibility of the show is very personal,” he told
reporters. “We had no agenda other than . . . values that we feel are true.” At
a news conference beforehand, he explained that one of the reasons he “put the
NHS in the show is that everyone is aware of how important NHS is to everybody
in the country. One of the core values of our society is that it doesn’t matter
who you are, you will get treated the same in terms of health care.”
Can anyone seriously believe that? Sunday’s British
papers report that a study by the research firm Lloyd’s TSB Premier Banking
found that nearly two-thirds of Britons earning more than $78,700 a year have
taken out private health insurance because they don’t trust the NHS. A survey
by the British health-care organization Bupa found that two-thirds of its
customers cited the risk of infection from superbugs as a top reason for buying
private insurance. Shaun Matisonn, the chief executive of PruHealth, says that
“patients today are sophisticated consumers of health care. They research the
treatments they want, but cannot always get them through the NHS.”
Horror stories about the NHS abound. A 2007 survey of
almost 1,000 physicians by Doctors’ Magazine found that two-thirds said they
had been told by their local NHS trust not to prescribe certain drugs, and one
in five doctors knew patients who had suffered as a result of treatment
rationing. The study cited one physician who characterized the NHS as “a lottery.”
A new study this year by GP magazine supports that conclusion. Through Freedom
of Information Act records, it found that 90 percent of NHS trusts were
rationing care.
Rick Dewsbury of the Daily Mail was aghast at the worship
of the NHS during Friday’s Olympic ceremony. The columnist noted the sheer
hypocrisy of the spectacle, as “the majority of the athletes taking part in the
Games will have access to the most expensive cutting-edge private treatment
available in the world for even the slightest graze on their bodies.”
Dewsbury recounted the 2009 case of Kane Gorny, a
22-year-old NHS patient. Gorny was admitted to the hospital for a hip
replacement. A series of hospital employees refused his request for a glass of
water and failed to give him diabetes medication. He went so far as to call the
emergency operator for help. When the police arrived, nurses assured them that
Gorny was confused and needed no outside help. A day later, he was dead of
dehydration. The official inquest into his death was published this month. It
found that neglect by hospital staff — “a cascade of individual failures” —
contributed to his death. Here’s hoping that not everyone is “treated the same”
in Britain’s NHS hospitals.
In Britain, we have seen what could be our future, and
it’s not a pretty sight.
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