Another day, another NHS reform. You could be forgiven for thinking from yesterday's news that London's local general hospitals, one of the targets of Labour's shakeup, are barely functioning. All I know is that mine has been an absolute godsend.
In the past year I have struggled with every parent's nightmare: a desperately ill child. My son Dillon was born last spring and immediately diagnosed with a brain condition. Its severity meant he had little chance of reaching any milestones, suffered from severe epilepsy, and had a foreshortened life expectancy.
The following 14 months were a nightmare. As parents, our lives were consumed with trying to get control of Dillon's seizures, coping with a host of devastating problems triggered by his malfunctioning brain and somehow carving out time to focus on our happy and healthy two-year-old. After surviving a winter characterised by frequent health scares and chest infections, Dill died of pneumonia in May.
Though we were unlucky in the tragic hand dealt to Dillon, we were lucky in one thing: the wonderful care he received through the NHS. He was born in our north London local general hospital, the Whittington, and ended up spending most of his short life there. He almost always had his own room, full of photos of those who loved him. The hospital was a 10-minute drive away; we visited him every day and took him home when he was well enough. While the staff of the paediatric department had little knowledge of his rare condition, they consulted regularly with Great Ormond Street over his care plan.
While Labour's plans to move away from large hospitals to "polyclinics" might make this particular scenario unlikely, I still have faith in the NHS. After all, I'm from the US, where the possibility of receiving such comprehensive and hassle-free care is a pipedream.
It's difficult to say how different our experience would have been had we lived in the US. While American medical care is among the best in the world, everything would have depended on our insurance cover. My partner and I aren't married and both of us are freelance, an entire lifestyle difficult to maintain in the US when insurance is tied to your employment. For most of Dill's life I was a member of an internet support group, made up of some 200 families around the world with Dill's condition.
US members had a unique theme, and it was all about insurance. Their sometimes desperate, usually middle-of-the-night messages focused on who was covered for what, how to work the system, how to cope when you had no insurance, how to get the piece of equipment that would greatly enhance your child's quality of life. For those who could get ample coverage, the form-filling was soul destroying. Many families had to routinely do fundraising. At least one of the families was trying to move to Britain specifically for the healthcare.
Had we to deal with any of this I don't think we'd have been able to cope. Ours was a tragic year, one we would not wish on anyone. But it was made much better by our local healthcare system, not worse. Is that too much to ask? Of course the NHS has many problems. The money simply doesn't stretch far enough, and people suffer as a result. But despite endless reforms, nobody is talking about abandoning the system itself: it is rightly based on a principle of universal healthcare, a fundamental tenet of an enlightened society.
Michael Moore's latest documentary, Sicko, shines a harsh light on the disastrous state of healthcare in the US. It has yet to find a UK distributor. Let's hope it does soon. We can only benefit from reminding ourselves just how precious Britain's system is - and how disastrous life might be without one.
