Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sole job is to dig into the backgrounds of the people who use their facilities and make sure
they really are as destitute as they claim to be.
Despite the manifest insanities of private health care in America, there is no denying that
the quality of treatment is the best in the world. My uncle received superb and unstinting
care (and, not incidentally, they restored his health). He had a private room with a private
bath,aremotecontroltelevisionandvideorecorder,hisowntelephone.Thewholehospital
was carpeted and full of exotic palms and cheerful paintings. In government hospitals in
Britain, the only piece of carpet or color TV you find is in the nursing officers' lounge. I
worked in an NHS hospital years ago and once late at night I sneaked into the nursing of-
ficers' lounge just to see what it was like. Well, it was like the queen's sitting room. It was
all velvety furniture and half-eaten boxes of Milk Tray chocolates.
The patients, in the meantime, slept beneath bare light bulbs in cold and echoing barrack
halls, and spent their days working on jigsaw puzzles that had at least a fifth of the pieces
missing, awaiting a fortnightly twenty-second visit by a swift-moving retinue of doctors
andstudents. Those were, ofcourse, the goodolddays ofthe NHS.Things aren'tnearly so
splendid now.
Forgive me. I seem to have gone off on a little tangent there. I was supposed to be guiding
youacrossWisconsin,tellingyouinterestingfactsaboutAmerica'spremierdairystate,and
instead I go off and make unconstructive remarks about British and American health care.
This was unwarranted.
Anyway, Wisconsin is America's premier dairy state, producing 17 percent of the nation's
cheese and milk products, by golly, though as I drove across its rolling pleasantness I
wasn't particularly struck by an abundance of dairy cows. I drove for long hours, south
past Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh and then west towards Iowa. This was quintessen-
tial Midwestern farming country, a study in browns, a landscape of low wooded hills, bare
trees, faded pastures, tumble-down corn. It all had a kind of muted beauty. The farms were
large, scattered and prosperous looking. Every half-mile or so I would pass a snug-looking
farmhouse, with a porch swing and a yard full of trees. Standing nearby would be a red
barn with a rounded roof and a tall grain silo. Everywhere corncribs were packed to burst-
ing. Migrating birds filled the pale sky. The corn in the fields looked dead and brittle, but
often I passed large harvesters chewing up rows and spitting out bright yellow ears.
I drove through the thin light of afternoon along back highways. It seemed to take forever
to cross the state, but I didn't mind because it was so fetching and restful. There was
something uncommonly alluring about the day, about the season, the sense that winter was
