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Trump thought the British were protesting their health service. They weren't.


Demonstrators take part in pro-National Health Service march toward Downing Street in London on Feb. 3. (Will Oliver/European Pressphoto Agency-EFE)

LONDON — President Trump took a swing at Britain’s beloved national health service on Monday, tweeting that Britons were taking to the streets because their universal health-care system was running out of money and not working.

“The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!” he wrote.

His tweet about Britain’s universal health-care system — once said to be the closest thing that the British have to a national religion — provoked ire from across the political spectrum, especially because the protests were about putting more money into the NHS, not scrapping it.

Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s health secretary, said he was proud to hail from a country where people have coverage “no matter the size of their bank balance.”

Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party, said that Trump was “wrong” and that “people were marching because we love our NHS and hate what the Tories are doing to it. Healthcare is a human right.”

Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets to march in support of the NHS and to call for greater government funding.

The march was called “NHS in crisis: Fix it now” and was organized by the People’s Assembly and Health Campaigns Together. Demonstrators carried placards that read: “NHS: More staff, more beds, more funds” and “Saving lives costs money, Saving money costs lives.”

It’s hard to overstate just how proud Britons are of their health-care system. In the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, the NHS was celebrated with a dance sequence with nurses and patients. In the lead-up to the Brexit vote, the pro-Brexit side famously said that leaving the bloc would mean an extra 350 million pounds could be repatriated and spent on health care.

“We send the EU £350m a week - let’s fund our NHS instead,” was the slogan plastered on the side of a red campaign bus.

It’s also true that Britain has had, once again, a terrible winter flu season and that hospitals nationwide are struggling to cope with the spikes in demand.

There is a great deal of speculation that Trump’s tweet may have been inspired by a segment on the NHS by Fox News Channel, which the president frequently watches. In fact, he followed up his tweet on the NHS by thanking Fox News for “exposing the truth.”

Nigel Farage, a former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, was on the Fox News segment, saying that Britain’s health service was “pretty much at a breaking point” because of a “population crisis.”

“We just haven’t got enough hospitals, we haven’t got enough doctors, we haven’t got enough facilities,” he said.

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