Again, I've been careless and raising my blood pressure by listening to Fox News. As the debate over government funded healthcare rages, Fox News decided to support their ideas by saying the British health system is a disaster as well as the Canadian public system. They may as well have attacked my New Zealand system because we have a national health service.

Naturally they highlighted some individual disasters where people have suffered because of a public system, but it's easy to find examples to suit your argument, both for and against. Do you Americans with good health insurance still have bad experiences? Of course you do.

Here in NZ everyone has free hospital healthcare, but if you can afford it you can pay for private healthcare. It seems to work. Whether I work in NZ, Britain, Australia, we all seem to deal with the same problems. We deal with the same people, the nice, the bad, the rich and the dirt poor. We deal with the same conditions, the strokes, the MI's, the trauma. From the american nurses I've worked and shared experiences with, it seems we all end up dealing with exactly the same stuff.

One thing which is interesting is that waiting times in British ER's are substantially less than that in most American systms? Fox News didn't bother to mention that.

Anyway, I realise there is a lot more to and against this argument, but that damn Fox News is so bloody frustrating. I haven't actually heard any news from them, only one sided, uninformative and insulting comments to support their own agenda.

Tell me what it's like to nurse in America.

bryn hagan

Related: Bureaucracy, Healthcare Debate, Nursing Trends