Dr Allyson Pollock has an opinion piece on guardian.co.uk warning Britons not to get complacent over filmmaker Michael Moore’s depiction of the UK’s National Health Service as the paragon of virtue.
Says Pollock:
Viewers of Michael Moore’s new film will come away convinced that the public healthcare system in this country is superior to its privatised American counterpart, where more than 50 million people are without any kind of care at all. But does the government agree? Or has it instead been taking ideas from the very system revealed in Sicko to be so iniquitous?
Pollock, whose work has contributed greatly to CUPE’s understanding of the effects of public-private partnerships on health care, goes on to detail to growing connections between NHS bureaucrats and US corporations including Kaiser Permanente. Says Pollock:
The flow of ideas [is] all one-way: from the US to the UK.