Peter Hitchens, in his
Mail on Sunday column, contrasts David Cameron's put downs of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan and MP Alan Duncan. In defending Hannan over Duncan, "a keen supporter of the sexual and cultural revolution" (he is in a
civil partnership), Hitchens makes the following point:
I happen to think that we make too much of a fetish about health care, here and in America, because we’re all anxious to keep death at a distance and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Well, we would! Understandably, most people want to live for as long as possible, and usually feel for those who do not enjoy a healthy life. I think Hitchens wants to leave it all to god.
The truth is that doctors can patch us up if we injure ourselves, cure a rather limited number of diseases with pills or surgery, and comfort us if we feel rotten – but most of our ills are caused by the way we live, and many are the inevitable results of age.
Politics has no answer to this.
Really? Medical science is fixed forever, and the allocation of resources across the country and throughout the population is not an issue? A fortnight ago, Hitchens
objected to the Asquith government being "pioneers of the welfare state". So in fact politics has a solution Hitchens' dislikes, but he is trying to avoid admitting he thinks in this way. In fact, some of the Asquith government's policies on welfare were motivated by the shocking physical health of recruits during the Boer war, rather than from basic human decency or 'left-wing' politics.
