Why we need a proper debate about healthcare

What we’ve seen in the last few days cannot be described as a debate about healthcare. It was a session of transatlantic insult slinging – and damned lies. This raises two questions: is the future of the NHS a subject that can be discussed rationally? And is the internet taking to British politics to the inane extremes that we see in certain sections of the American media?

Let’s take this #welovethenhs Twitter campaign. Contrary to several British press reports, Sarah Palin did not describe the NHS as Orwellian or evil (she didn’t even mention Britain in her Facebook entry, here). But suggestions to the contrary have helped stoke this image of the NHS being under attack by a group which Gordon Brown has called “right wing in the United States” (a phrase I note he didn’t use when Bush was in power) and “their friends in the British Conservative Party” (booo!).