The US is worse by the numbers and yet the US is the UK's fault Like, what the US is is the UK's colonists sent to do their dirty work they couldn't stomach directly - genocide and slavery - while they still profited from it And in a sense that's more contemptible https://twitter.com/innesmck/status/1340591238001664000 …
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The US has very substantial ethnic minority populations consisting of the descendants of people who were enslaved and trafficked here and people from whom the land was seized Socialized medicine would be redistribution of wealth from colonizers to colonized So they said no
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The thing they did instead of socialized or single-payer medicine, employer-provided group health insurance, they did specifically because that's LIKE socialized health care but something you can limit to a subset of the population
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Everyone who, say, worked at Ford could be treated *as though* they lived in a social democracy with a welfare safety net, they could gatekeep Black people from working there and pretend they didn't exist, and in the prosperity of the 50s they thought that could last forever
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It's race It's always race, which is to say it's always the legacy of colonization, genocide and slavery, which is something that Brits get to pretend doesn't affect them because they did it and turned around and walked away
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NHS would've been a much harder sell to the British voting populace if it applied to the whole population of India too, wouldn't it? Or the former possessions in the Caribbean? Or if the AmRev hadn't happened and you had to pay for healthcare for Black people in Alabama
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But no, they divested from Empire when it got too troublesome and expensive, kept the money, went into retirement and tried to pretend they've always been one of the nice countries Cracking their shitty jokes "Indigenous studies? Well here English history IS indigenous", har har
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Even being more charitable, founding the NHS happened because they managed to get a fluke Labour party win between periods of Churchill's genocidal policies.
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Oh and if you wonder what they value more culturally: I inherited my grandmother's beloved portrait of Winston Churchill, but she could never remember Clement Attlee's name.
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The NHS was introduced when the UK was bankrupt and the Empire was crumbling
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I think the difference may be that while both countries suffer from bigotry, the lay-racists in the UK tend to conceptualize POC primarily as an "over there" issue. In the US we can't have any social programs without conservative troglodytes whining about "urban" Welfare Queens.
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