Universal health care: a picture of the system in practice on its happiest occasion would shock Americans and Western Europeans alike

Julia Gorin remembers what life was like in a country with free and universal health care:

I recently came face to face with a level of Western ignorance that I hadn't encountered since the 1980s, when Russian immigrants were still a novelty to Americans. A British-American asked my father a question that could only come from someone who has known freedom his whole life: "Why did you leave Russia? Your family was there, you had a job, you had free health care. Why did you leave?" The questioner, a former editor with the New York Times, then proceeded to assert that today's Britain and U.S. are no longer free.

The exchange reminded me just how out of touch many who live in the free world are with the reality of life under tyranny--and why, therefore, so many Americans and Brits think nothing is scarier than war. On the subject even of that oft-cited "perk" of Soviet life, universal health care, a picture of the system in practice on its happiest occasion would shock Americans and Western Europeans alike.

After providing numerous examples of health workers, among other things, "yelling at her [mother] as soon as she walked in" to the hospital, Gorin concludes:

We share the planet with North Korea and its ilk. As many intellectuals, academics and literary and Hollywood luminaries commented soon after 9/11--with some vindication in their tone--we do not live in a vacuum. Yet for the most part they, along with the isolationist right, seem indifferent to the suffering of tyranny's victims. They blithely champion the status quo, or in the case of Iraq the status quo ante, repeating only that Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat to us.

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