Joseph, he asked for ‘one example’. After providing broad figures, I cited one that made the news. Actually, it wasn’t the only recent death of a child because of an easily treatable tooth condition in your country. But surely you can see that while shocking deaths like this do make headlines, it’s even more shocking that the 100 million without dental insurance do not raise hardly any media interest, and neither does the huge burden of dental ill-health.

“As for an example, surely you know about the case last year of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver of Maryland, who died following an untreated toothache.”

How many more times are you going to keep asserting things like this without providing even one example?

Waiting lists have come down drastically under our Labour government - all cancer referrals are made in a maximum two week window now for example. In the US, as we know from studies such as the latest Commonwealth Fund, millions go without care at all.

The drug issue - this is interesting now as the NICE model is being picked up by many other countries and it will apply in the US in some form (and already does of course - cost-effectiveness of marginally effective/unproven drugs are being taken into account). There was a good article in the NYT the other day about NICE and how it is pioneering tough decision making for other countries, including the US See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/health/03nice.html

“To arrest this trend, the United States needs to adopt at least some of NICE’s methods, said Dr. Mark McClellan and Dr. Sean Tunis, who served earlier in the Bush administration as, respectively, administrator and chief medical officer of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”

The rate of hospital acquired infections is higher in the US.

There are no ER parking lot waits. That was an isolated example. In the US, you keep telling us that ERs are overcrowded.

Dental - yes, our NHS system is not good, mainly because the government messed up the pay formula and many dentists went private (unlike with primary care docs, who got a great deal). But in the US, there are millions without any dental care and who are pulling their own teeth as we speak.

You only have to live in fear that you’ll die while languishing on a waiting list, or be denied some cancer drug because the apparatchiks at NICE won’t pony up, or get some infection from your rat-infested hospitals, or die in the parking lot of the ER because your ambulance has been stacked there to manipulate the wait time stats, or be forced to pull your own tooth because you can’t get at a dentist, or any number of other horrors associated with your ramshackle health care system.

Of course not - it’s free at the point of use, which means that unlike millions of Americans we don’t live day to day with fear we can’t pay health bills. And the overall tax take per head is about half the health spend per head in the US. And if you don’t pay tax - say you’re a child - it’s entirely free.

Brits their pockets vacuumed every pay period to pay for it.

No, just an ordinary citizen with my family registered with a local primary care practice, although I do some consultancy work with various health organisations around Europe. Believe it or not, the NHS is highly valued by the vast majority of Britons, not least because of general practitioners (GPs) instantly accessible with no fee in every locality by everyone, poor or rich. Filling a prescription is free to many, such as children, and in any case the flat rate for any drug prescribed by a GP is about $10. You do understand this value I take it?