Britons Respond to Trump Attack on UK Healthcare: 'Nobody Here Would Trade for What America Has'
Months after his party failed to pass deeply unpopular legislation that would have taken healthcare from tens of millions of Americans, President Donald Trump on Monday launched an attack on “universal healthcare” that misleadingly attempted to use ongoing protests in the United Kingdom as proof that publicly-funded systems don’t work.
In reality, thousands marched in London over the weekend to demand more National Health Service (NHS) funding, which has been slashed as a result of British Conservatives’ relentless agenda of austerity and privatization.
“They are marching to protect [the NHS],” British journalist David Ottewell wrote in response to the U.S. president. “Not to replace it with a privatized system.”
Trump’s tweet comes months after the GOP attempted to ram through a bill that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and taken healthcare from as many as 32 million Americans.
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While Republicans and the president have largely abandoned their efforts to totally repeal the ACA, they remain engaged in a campaign to sabotage the law on numerous fronts.
Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of Democrats have co-sponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Medicare for All bill, which he introduced last September.
Polls conducted over the past year have consistently found that a growing number of Americans are rapidly “shifting toward the political left” on healthcare and embracing the idea of a publicly-funded system that guarantees coverage to all as a right.
According to an AP/NORC poll published last July, 62 percent of Americans believe it is “the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage.” Under the current U.S. healthcare system, nearly 30 million Americans lack healthcare—a number that has risen significantly since Trump took office.
Trump has even signaled support for “universal healthcare” and praised the publicly-funded healthcare systems of other nations in the past, as many were quick to note in response to his tweet on Monday.
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