Sicko

I came out of Michael Moore's latest film feeling very grateful for Nye Bevan and William Beveridge. For all its faults (and there were plenty of omissions in the film: no mention of patients pulling their own teeth out because they can't afford to see a dentist, old women dead of MRSA, or the postcode lottery of cancer drug provision), the NHS provides an immeasurably better service than most of us could expect to receive in the US, a country where tens of millions have no health insurance whatsoever and corporate dividends come before human lives.