Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Saul Friedman (bio) writes the weekly Gray Matters column which appears here each Saturday. Links to past Gray Matters columns can be found here. Saul's Reflections column, in which he comments on news, politics and social issues from his perspective as one of the younger members of the greatest generation, also appears at Time Goes By twice each month.

I would not live anywhere but the United States (except maybe in an Italian villa). But we could take some lessons from what we patronizingly call the “old world.” Old, after all, usually means they know how to survive and learn. And we’ve yet to learn how an adult nation should act.

For example, we don’t need the barbarous death penalty, especially if we stop the insane easy access to guns. We stop mothers from boarding airplanes with too much baby shampoo, but our Congress refuses to bar people on the no-fly watch list from buying assault rifles.

And if the right-wingers truly believe in limited government, should not our government stay out of a woman’s right to choose abortion and my right to die?

Along those lines, virtually every nation in the old world provides for its citizens access to free or inexpensive health care. But only one reporter covering the hotly fought British parliamentary elections for CNN-World (which is seen by too few Americans) told us, in a fine story, that all three major party leader candidates – with ideologies ranging from left to right - agreed on one thing: The British National Health Service is so popular that in the campaign, it was an untouchable. Indeed it got high praise and support from all the prime minister candidates. Paul Armstrong reported,

“To many Republican politicians [and some Democrats] in the United States, a publicly funded national health system like the NHS is the embodiment of austere, Soviet-era medical care but in the UK, it is viewed as sacrosanct.

“Launched in 1948 by a left-wing Labor government [which replaced the conservative Tories under Winston Churchill], the NHS was created out of a long held ideal that everyone should have access to good health care regardless of wealth.

“More than a half-century on, millions of Britons still enjoy free medical care, from routine consultations on coughs and colds to open heart surgery. Over the years it can boast pioneering breakthroughs from Britain’s first heart transplant in 1968...to the 1988 breast screening program, providing free mammograms to reduce breast cancer in women over 50.”

There are four parts of the National Health Service, for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The scale of the NHS is vast, with thousands of doctors, technicians, nurses and administrative personnel working for the service.

There has been criticism of waiting lists for treatment or elective surgery. But those critics ignore the chaos and the waiting in America’s packed emergency rooms on a weekend or Monday morning. In Britain, as I discovered years ago when I was struck with flu symptoms while covering a story, I could choose from dozens of neighborhood doctors who worked for the NHS. I was treated at no charge. (It was the same for me in Israel and South Africa).

Despite the criticism, the NHS spends $2,300 per capita on health care costs in the U.K., which is far less than the $6,700 in the U.S. And U.S. spending is way more than any of the comprehensive and universal health care systems in the old world. Still, there are 40 million people in the U.S. without health insurance, which is unheard of and would be scandalous in the old world.

Armstrong writes, the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, now prime minister, was effusive in his praise of the NHS, noting on his web site, ”Millions of people are grateful for the care they have received from the NHS – including my own family.” (British conservatives have no ideological relation to American right-wingers. We should remember that the conservative icon Margaret Thatcher, who would not be considered conservative enough in the U.S. today, declined to mess with the NHS).

Perhaps if President Obama had used and learned from his own family’s access to government-run, socialized medicine, we might not have given our health care reforms over to the drug and insurance companies. But it turns out that Obama, unfortunately, is neither a liberal or a socialist and was not as willing as his British counterparts to even consider single-payer health care reforms. A little socialism is okay for the banks, GM and the president’s family but not for us.

In Britain, the Labor Party and the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats, who will be part of Cameron’s government, joined in defending and praising the NHS. In the U.S., said Ruth Thornby, a British researcher who studied the American health care system, Republicans are

“worried about rationing by government or an official bureaucrat making decisions about who gets what. (But) bureaucrats within private health insurance companies are making those decisions all the time...”

Indeed, in the U.S., only original Medicare, untainted by private schemes like Medicare Advantage, provides beneficiaries with free choices of doctors, labs and hospital, anywhere in the country. For those of you who consider any socialist system as austere, I’d urge you to browse the colorful and informative website of the NHS.

While the old world has placed its trust and health care systems in the hands of their governments, the reforms just passed by the Congress have been entrusted to private insurance and drug companies, with the hope they will voluntarily comply with the reforms. This despite the fact that the companies are bound by their fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to return as much as possible on their investments.

On May 9, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D, W.V.), scolded the nation’s leading health insurance companies for “gaming” the new law to dodge and weaken it in subtle but important ways. In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary, Katherine Sebelius, Rockefeller noted that the law provides that insurance companies are supposed to spend 85 percent of premiums on health care. Rockefeller charged the companies are redefining administrative costs as medical costs and thus not spending more on patient care, as the law intended.

On May 6, CNN reported that large companies, such as Verizon, AT&T, Caterpillar and Deere, were secretly considering dropping health care coverage their employees have had for years. This would mean undermining a crucial Obama promise of the health reform, that beneficiaries could keep the coverage they’ve had. In addition, the companies are balking, as too expensive, that part of the law which provides insurance for employees’ children up to age 26.

If employer-sponsored plans were dropped, it would help the bottom lines of the companies but raise considerably the projected costs of the health care reforms. Representative Henry Waxman (D, CA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, reacted angrily and demanded internal documents of the companies on their intentions. So far, possible change is on hold.

Similarly, Sebelius’ public pressure forced Anthem Blue Cross and Wellpoint in California to back away from an announced 39 percent increase in premiums. And she criticized Wellpoint for cancelling coverage on women diagnosed with breast cancer, to be prohibited under the new law. Wellpoint denies this.

Surely the companies will keep trying to nibble away at the reforms. If they do, government has little recourse except moral suasion. But the only punishment, tucked into the deep innards of the law, is a paltry $100 fine for each day of a violation. A multi-billion dollar insurance giant will find it more profitable to pay the fine than abide by the law.

Thus, this question for Americans: Who would you trust more with your health care? Government (as in Medicare or the NHS) or your insurance carrier?

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