91-year-old Veteran Brings Audience To Tears Explains The Importance of National Health Care

I hope this goes viral, and I hope people actually understand how important this is everywhere in the world.

In any civilized society there should be a NHC system. The conditions that this man and many others lived through were not even comprehensible to most of us alive today.

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“I came into this world in the rough and ready year of 1923. I am from Barnsley and I can tell you that my childhood, like so many others from that era, was not an episode from Downton Abbey. Instead, it was a barbarous time. It was a bleak time. It was an uncivilized time because public healthcare didn’t exist.

Back then hospitals, doctors and medicine were for the privileged few because they were run for profit rather than as a vital state service that keeps a nation’s citizens fit and healthy. My memories stretch back almost a hundred years, and if I close my eyes, I can smell the poverty that oozed from the dusky tenement streets of my boyhood.

I can taste on my lips the bread and drippings I was served for my tea. I can remember extreme hunger, and my parent’s undying love for me. I can still feel my mum and dad’s desperation as they tried to keep our family safe and healthy in the slum we called home. Poor mum and dad.

No matter how hard they tried to protect me and my sisters, the cards were stacked against them because common diseases trolled our neighbourhoods and snuffed out life like a cold breath on a warm candle flame. I still remember hearing while I played as a child on my street the anguished cries that floated from a window on my boyhood street. They were the screams from a woman dying from cancer who couldn’t afford morphine to ease her passage from this life.

Cont......

a reply to: Realtruth

No one in our community was safe from poor health, sickness and disease. In our home, TB came for my oldest sister, Marion, who was the apple of my dad’s eye. Her sickness and his inability to pay for medicine broke his heart. Tuberculosis tortured my sister and left her an invalid that had to be restrained with ropes tied to her bed.

My parents did everything in their power to keep Marion alive and comfortable but they just didn’t have the dosh to get her to the best clinics, doctors or medicines. Instead she wasted away before our eyes until my mother could no longer handle her care and she was dispatched to our workhouse infirmary where she died 87 years ago. Mum and dad couldn’t afford to bury their darling daughter. So like the rest of our country’s indigent, she was dumped nameless into a pauper’s pit. My family’s story isn’t unique.

Rampant poverty and no health care were the norm for the Britain of my youth. That injustice galvanized my generation to become, after the Second World War, the tide that raised all boats. In 1945, at the age of 22, still in the RAF after a long hard Great Depression and a savage and brutal war, I voted for the first time.

Election Day 1945 was one of the proudest days in my life. I felt that I was finally getting a chance to grab destiny by the shirt collar and that is why I voted for Labour and for the creation of the NHS. Today my heart is with all of those people from my generation who didn’t make it past childhood, didn’t get an education, didn’t grow as individuals, didn’t marry, didn’t raise a family and didn’t enjoy the fruits of retirement. They died needlessly and too early. But my heart is also with the people of the present, who are struggling once more to make ends meet, and whose futures I fear for.

Today, we must be vigilant. We must be vocal. We must demand that the NHS will always remain an institution for the people and by the people. We must never ever let the NHS free from our grasp because if we do your future will be my past. So I want to say loudly and clearly: Mr Cameron, keep your mitts off my NHS.”

a reply to: Realtruth


Fixing the healthcare system is easy (in the US). Like Lasik surgery, prices fall when prices are clearly posted and there is competition for that service.

Under the current system, you don't have clear pricing and you just get stuck paying whatever the provider charges.


An Easy System that would definitely bring prices down and spur competition is mandatory services pricing similar to what we see with restaurants and most products and services today.

Wouldn't it be nice that if you needed an MRI on you abdomen, that you could check an ap or website and find all the providers in the area that offer it and the price? Same with any non-emergency service.

Like most dental insurance. Med insurance should again clearly show the $ amount that each coded procedure is payed. You as the member can choose to find a Doctor or provider and the difference payed will easily spur competition to lower prices.

If your insurance covers $550 for a xxx coded MRI, you can shop around and decide where you want to get it. Some providers might charge 1000, some 600, you choose and pay the difference.

I voted for Labour and for the creation of the NHS.

Given that it was at a Labour Party Conference, it seems to be more a sob story to gain support, than about health care.

originally posted by: DAVID64
Given that it was at a Labour Party Conference, it seems to be more a sob story to gain support, than about health care.

Regardless of the agenda wisdom comes with age and life experience, unfortunately in most western societies we discard, brush-off, put to pasture, and even ignore what older folks have to say.

I believe there is a big difference between a "sob story" and life experience wouldn't you agree?

a reply to: Realtruth

Oh yes, a huge difference. But, like I said, obviously he's there telling his story to support the Party.

His experience and wisdom should be respected and acted upon!

a reply to: RP2SticksOfDynamite

Lets remember its a far sight better already than it was then.

originally posted by: infolurker
a reply to: Realtruth


Fixing the healthcare system is easy (in the US). Like Lasik surgery, prices fall when prices are clearly posted and there is competition for that service.

Under the current system, you don't have clear pricing and you just get stuck paying whatever the provider charges.


An Easy System that would definitely bring prices down and spur competition is mandatory services pricing similar to what we see with restaurants and most products and services today.

Wouldn't it be nice that if you needed an MRI on you abdomen, that you could check an ap or website and find all the providers in the area that offer it and the price? Same with any non-emergency service.

Like most dental insurance. Med insurance should again clearly show the $ amount that each coded procedure is payed. You as the member can choose to find a Doctor or provider and the difference payed will easily spur competition to lower prices.

If your insurance covers $550 for a xxx coded MRI, you can shop around and decide where you want to get it. Some providers might charge 1000, some 600, you choose and pay the difference.

Exactly, but this is what most people do not understand about healthcare. The problem is we have a system setup with the consumer is not the one paying for it so there is no incentive to shop for pricing. In addition, because the system has been so screwed up with government regulations that prevent competition among insurance providers across state lines and make it difficult to decouple the insurance policies from someone's employer, we have the situation we are in now.

You should be able to shop for health insurance much like you shop for car insurance. health insurance should be mandatory, but there has to be a free market for it which there is currently not. In addition, health insurance is suppose to cover unexpected events, not every time you get a sniffle. Could you imagine what your car insurance would cost if your provider had to pay for your oil changes, tire rotations, and all the other general maintenance that is required?

I have a good friend who is a surgeon. I asked him what he charges for a hip replacement and he couldn't tell me! I said if I came to you and wanted my hip replaced and I was paying cash, what would it cost? he had no clue! We encountered the same situation for a service that our insurance didn't cover. We paid cash and the clinic could barely figure out what to charge.

90% of people would benefit from a less regulated and more transparent health system. Those who are indigent would still be cared for through charity.

Back then how many doctors were There? Back then surgery was surgery cut open and removed.
It's not the same these days but it shouldn't cost what it does today. Put our tax money in-country dropping the cost not supporting other countries and as well war. Can't buy love.
The US sells pills to other countries for $5 when it cost us $1000.
Fix these problems and you fix health care. You need to make it affordable and it is not even close.

One thing also I know hunger and I know pain, I need new teeth as well from getting hit by lightning. The VA fails me in every visit for help. Today you still need to be wealthy for good healthcare and mandatory healthcare is a joke.
Today and then is no different. But they had clean air clean drinking water. Lets fix those things as well.

He is absolutely right. Our "social programs" and labor unions here in America, such as they are, were created out of conditions that current generations can not even imagine. History teaches us what we can become again, as mistakes are easily repeatable.

We must NEVER forget that conditions could devolve BACK TO the "way things were."

Those conditions were and are unacceptable and inhumane. We as a species can certainly do better than that. We here in America have a mythos of "pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps," and "rugged individualism," which are at odds with anything "socially cooperative" that seems to "give something to those who haven't by-the-Gods been born rich enough, smart enough or hard working enough to do for themselves."

I personally think this attitude of "me for mine" can give rise to an active sociopathy in society, where only "deserving" (as defined by material success and wealth) people "deserve" to live, therefore the rest are condemned to the mercy of unrelenting social, economic, physical, health and educational deficits often CREATED and SUPPORTED by those at the far right of the bell curve who become concerned mainly with accumulating more wealth and holding on to what they have, ensuring the best for themselves and themselves alone.

Just my two cents...

a reply to: Connman

You deserve better, especially as a Vet. Our country has failed you, in that it has failed to properly fund and manage your care. We can and should do better, immediately. The VA where I live apparently does a great job. I regret you have to deal with poor quality of care, and feel for your situation. It is so frustrating to pay all these taxes, with so much going to the military, and to see how poorly our soldiers and military are sometimes treated after giving their service.

I also agree with the air and water issue, though there was plenty of pollution way back then too, in city areas, paper mills, factories, and coal mining towns with no regulation. Open sewage in rivers was also a problem. We have been forever trying to manage our waste, even back to the heaping trash pits of our cave dwelling ancestors (I wish I had their air and water!!).

peace,
AB