He later tweeted that the Democrats in the United States "want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care". Like the British allegedly suffer under the NHS.
In fact, the English National Health Service (Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate but similar systems) is, in former Conservative Cabinet member Nigel Lawson's words, "the closest thing the English have to a religion".
It is almost universally loved, and the protests were about government underfunding of the NHS.
But are the English right to love their healthcare system — and are the French and Germans and Russians and Japanese and the people of almost every other developed country right to revere their own similar systems?
The United States may be the odd country out, but it does spend far more on healthcare than anybody else.
The United States spends 16 per cent of its entire gross domestic product on healthcare, almost twice as much as the average (8.2 per cent for Japan; 8.4 per cent for the UK; 8.5 per cent for Australia; 10.4 per cent for Germany).
In theory, that ought to mean Americans are healthier than everybody else and live longer. In practice, it's just the opposite.
The United States is the only developed country where the average lifespan is less than 80. In fact, it's barely 78 years in the US, whereas everywhere else it's in 80-82 range.
The US also has the highest preventable death rate of any developed country, and the highest infant mortality rate by a very wide margin. Americans spend more on health, and get less back, than anybody else.
The model pioneered by Britain's NHS on July 5, 1948, has been so successful that it is spreading into many developing countries as well.
India is still a poor country, but its National Health Policy 2017 goals include a commitment to "progressively achieve Universal Health Coverage". China is working to provide affordable basic healthcare to all residents by 2020, and so on ...
Attitudes change over time.
In the 1930s, nobody thought there was some sort of basic human right to healthcare. The well-off paid for their own, and the rest depended on charity (which wasn't very dependable).
What changed that attitude was World War II, a time of great solidarity and sacrifice in every country.
It was the worst war in history, but it produced a generation who believed that the people who had shared in the sacrifice (in both the countries that won and those that lost) must not be left behind in the peace that followed.
The will was there to do new and great things, and they did them.
It is no coincidence that the same year of 1948 saw the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which said (among other things): "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services."
The world had turned, and what had been a privilege became a right — one that is still widely abused or neglected, of course, but it has nevertheless spread across the entire planet in the past 70 years.
Why did America miss out?
The answer is probably a free-market ideology so strong that it enabled the insurance companies and the medical profession (which opposed the idea of a national health system in every country, at least initially) to win the political battle in the US and strangle the idea in its cradle.
It keeps coming back even there, but for the moment Americans must go on paying the costs of their ideology.
Gwynne Dyer's new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).
