The premise of Michael Moore’s latest film Sicko is that the mostly private healthcare system in the United States is a failure, and that universal healthcare of the kind existing in the United Kingdom (the National Health Service or NHS) is what America needs. Anecdotes are not by themselves a coherent argument against universal healthcare, but they play a useful role in demonstrating the inherent wrongness of the idea. Although both health care systems are good at different things, we felt it important to dispel the idea that universal health care is an inherently better system. Both Stephen Graham and myself have written about our experiences of accompanying our wives through the process of having a baby in the UK:

Birth by
John’s storyStephen’s story