[2][3][4][5][6] The term was first widely used in the United States by advocates of the American Medical Association in opposition to President Harry S. Truman's 1947 health care initiative.
The United States Veterans Health Administration and the medical departments of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, would also fall under this narrow definition.
[14][15] More recently, American conservative critics of health care reform have attempted to broaden the term by applying it to any publicly funded system.
[10] The term is often used by conservatives in the U.S. to imply that the privately run health care system would become controlled by the government, thereby associating it with socialism, which has negative connotations to some people in American political culture.
Reid (The Healing of America, 2009): The term ["socialized medicine"] was popularized by a public relations firm [Whitaker and Baxter[failed verification]] working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to disparage President Truman's proposal for a national health care system.
[8][9]The AMA conducted a nationwide campaign called Operation Coffee Cup during the late 1950s and early 1960s in opposition to the Democrats' plans to extend Social Security to include health insurance for the elderly, later known as Medicare.
As part of the plan, doctors' wives would organize coffee meetings in an attempt to convince acquaintances to write letters to Congress opposing the program.
[29] In July 2007, one month after the release of Michael Moore's film Sicko, Rudy Giuliani, the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, attacked the health care plans of Democratic presidential candidates as socialized medicine that was European and socialist,[30][31][citation needed] Giuliani claimed that he had a better chance of surviving prostate cancer in the US than he would have had in England[32] and went on to repeat the claim in campaign speeches for three months[33][34][35][36][37][38] before making them in a radio advertisement.
[39] After the radio ad began running, the use of the statistic was widely criticized by FactCheck.org,[40] PolitiFact.com,[41] by The Washington Post,[42] and others who consulted leading cancer experts and found that Giuliani's cancer survival statistics to be false, misleading or "flat wrong", the numbers having been reported to have been obtained from an opinion article by Giuliani health care advisor David Gratzer, a Canadian psychiatrist in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal where Gratzer was a senior fellow.
[44] The St. Petersburg Times said that Giuliani's tactic of "injecting a little fear" exploited cancer, which was "apparently not beneath a survivor with presidential aspirations".
[46][47] Health care professionals have tended to avoid the term because of its pejorative nature, but if they use it, they do not include publicly funded private medical schemes such as Medicaid.
Medical staff, academics and most professionals in the field and international bodies such as the World Health Organization tend to avoid use of the term.
[citation needed] Part B coverage (Medical) requires a monthly premium of $96.40 (and possibly higher) and the first $135 of costs per year also fall to the senior, not the government.
[58] A poll released in February 2008, conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health and Harris Interactive, indicated that Americans are currently divided in their opinions of socialized medicine, and this split correlates strongly with their political party affiliation.
[citation needed][dubious – discuss] In the United States, neither of the main parties favors a socialized system that puts the government in charge of hospitals or doctors, but they do have different approaches to financing and access.
[66][dubious – discuss] Economist Arnold Kling attributes the present cost crisis mainly to the practice of what he calls premium medicine, which overuses expensive forms of technology that is of marginal or no proven benefit.
[69] Paul Krugman and Robin Wells argue that all of the evidence indicates that public insurance of the kind available in several European countries achieves equal or better results at much lower cost, a conclusion that also applies within the United States.
In England, a survey for the British Medical Association of the general public showed overwhelming support for the tax funding of health care.
Such systems give the consumer a free choice amongst competing insurers whilst achieving universality to a government directed minimum standard.
Everyone waiting for care is reflected in the data, which, in the UK for example, are used to inform debate, decision-making and research within the government and the wider community.
[95] These people wait an indefinitely long period and may never get care they need, but actual numbers are simply unknown because they are not recorded in official statistics.
The debate in the U.S. over rationing has enraged some in the UK and statements made by politicians such as Sarah Palin and Chuck Grassley resulted in a mass Internet protest on websites such as Twitter and Facebook under the banner title "welovetheNHS" with positive stories of NHS experiences to counter the negative ones being expressed by these politicians and others and by certain media outlets such as Investor's Business Daily and Fox News.
[citation needed] Palin had alleged that America will create rationing "death panels" to decide whether old people could live or die, again widely taken to be a reference to NICE.
The chairman of the British Medical Association, Hamish Meldrum, said he was dismayed by the "jaw-droppingly untruthful attacks" made by American critics.
The chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), told The Guardian newspaper that "it is neither true, nor is it anything you could extrapolate from anything we've ever recommended" that Kennedy would be denied treatment by the NHS.
[106][107] Britain's former age-based policy that once prevented the use of kidney dialysis as treatment for older patients with renal problems, even to those who can privately afford the costs, has been cited as another example.
[87] Opponents also state categorizing patients based on factors such as social value to the community or age will not work in a heterogeneous society without a common ethical consensus such as the U.S.[85] Doug Bandow of the CATO Institute wrote that government decision making would "override the differences in preferences and circumstances" for individuals and that it is a matter of personal liberty to be able to buy as much or as little care as one wants.
[108] Neither argument recognizes the fact that in most countries with socialized medicine, a parallel system of private health care allows people to pay extra to reduce their waiting time.
[104] Arthur Kellermann, associate dean for health policy at Emory University, stated rationing by ability to pay rather than by anticipated medical benefits in the U.S. makes its system more unproductive, with poor people avoiding preventive care and eventually using expensive emergency treatment.
[86] Ethicist Daniel Callahan has written that U.S. culture overly emphasizes individual autonomy rather than communitarian morals and that stops beneficial rationing by social value, which benefits everyone.