As the US health care debate drags on, both the Canadian and British single payer systems have come under attack from the unhinged right wing on both sides of the pond. Whole Foods CEO and wingnut du jour John Mackey took a swing at it in his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. While MEP (Member of the European Parliament) Daniel Hannan, who blogs for the ultra-right wing Telegraph, called the HNS a "sixty year mistake" and described the NHS as a relic he "wouldn't wish on anybody" - during a debate on US healthcare reforms on American television.

Here's the UK Guardian debunking some of the nonsense that the Thatcherite-Reaganite right is pushing:

The claim

Ted Kennedy, 77, would not be treated for his brain tumour if he was in Britain because he is too old - Charles Grassley, Republican senator from Iowa.

The response

Untrue, says the Department of Health. "There is no ban on anyone of any age receiving any treatment, " said a spokesman. "Whether to prescribe drugs or recommend surgery is rightly a clinical decision taken on a case by case basis."

The claim

Government health officials in England have decided that $22,750 (£14,000) is what six months' life is worth. Under their socialised system, if a medical treatment costs more, you're out of luck - Club for Growth

The response

The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) decides whether new drugs represent value for money for the NHS in England and Wales. It replied: "This is a gross misrepresentation of how Nice applies health economics to try and address the central issue: how to allocate healthcare rationally within the context of limited healthcare resources. Nice assesses the cost of a treatment in terms of a cost-utility analysis which takes account of the quality adjusted life year - the amount and quality of extended life it is hoped the patient will gain. The current ceiling is £30,000 but exceptions are made."

The claim

In England, anyone over 59 years of age cannot receive heart repairs, stents or bypass because it is not covered as being too expensive and not needed - an anonymously authored, but widely circulated, in an email largely sent to older voters.

The response

Totally untrue. Growing numbers of patients over 65 with heart conditions are having surgery, including valve repairs and heart bypass surgery, says Professor Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation's (BHF) medical director. For example, the average age at which people have a bypass operation has risen from 58 in 1991 to 66 in 2008.

There are more rebuttals at the Guardian website.

Meanwhile, as this article from the Associated Press suggests, Britons are stepping up to defend their National Heath Service:

Britons reacted with outrage Friday at American criticism of the country's health care system and defended their cradle-to-grave medical coverage on Twitter, television and in the tabloids.

Right-wing attacks on President Barack Obama's health reform plans have struck a nerve in Britain, where residents broadly take for granted their universal coverage under the state-funded National Health Service -- and look askance at the millions of Americans without insurance.

"Land of the Fee," declared the Daily Mirror in reference to the United States' high-charging health model. The London newspaper called the "lies and distortions" being circulated in the United States about the National Health Service "truly sickening."

"Jaw droppingly untruthful," said the British Medical Association's chairman, Hamish Meldrum.

"NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death," Prime Minister Gordon Brown tweeted. "Thanks for always being there."

Even British health campaigner Kate Spall -- who criticizes NHS failings in U.S. television ads produced by Conservatives for Patients' Rights, a lobby group that opposes Obama's plans -- declared that the group had misled her and was distorting her true views. Spall's mother died of kidney cancer while waiting for treatment.

"There are failings in the system but I'm not anti-NHS at all," Spall told the British Broadcasting Corp.

"I help the vulnerable patients in our country that come to me for help, those that have been denied treatment," she said. "So the irony is, the people that are falling through the net in the U.S. are patients that I would support anyway."

Britain's opposition Conservative Party is distancing itself from its maverick member of European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, who has criticized the NHS on U.S. news programs.

Conservative leader David Cameron dismissed Hannan as having "eccentric views."

In an e-mail to Conservative Party workers published on his blog, Cameron said millions, including his own family, were grateful for NHS-provided care.

"Just look at all the support which the NHS has received on Twitter over the last couple of days," he wrote. "It is a reminder -- if one were needed -- of how proud we in Britain are of the NHS."

The NHS, founded in 1948, is the cornerstone of the United Kingdom's welfare state.

About 12 percent of the UK's 61 million residents have private insurance, but the vast majority rely on state-funded emergency care, surgery and access to family doctors. Even those who complain about the system say they want it improved, not dismantled.

British officials acknowledge that their system has been struggling to cope and faces a 15 billion pound ($24 billion) deficit. Hospitals are often overcrowded, dirty and understaffed, which means some patients do not get the care they are promised.

It gets better. The severely disabled Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking declared, "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," pointedly rebutting claims made by Investor's Business Daily, which incidentally John Mackey cited in his WSJ op-ed, that he "wouldn't have a chance" of survival here in his homeland because of treatment-rationing.

Go on the social networking site Twitter and you will a campaign that is ralling support for the NHS attracting so many thousands of messages that the newly launched "welovetheNHS" trending topic crashed the site earlier this week. Among the contributors: Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who felt moved to "tweet" his encouragement while vacationing in Scotland.

More from the Los Angeles Times:

Britain's oft-maligned National Health Service today was on the receiving end of an outpouring of love and affection it hasn't felt in years, owing to a growing backlash against what many here see as lies and calumnies being spread about the NHS by conservative critics of President Obama's healthcare reform plan in the U.S.

Those critics have branded the NHS as "evil" and "Orwellian," an example of socialized medicine to be avoided at all costs. They blast the system, which offers free healthcare to all, as an expensive failure that denies new drugs to cancer victims, blocks the elderly from receiving certain kinds of treatment and generally puts a low value on human life.

But such allegations have set the blood boiling in many Britons who this week hit back in the blogosphere, in print and over the airwaves to defend one of their country's most jealously guarded institutions from an unexpected attack from across the pond.

Ordinary people have piped up with stories of excellent care given by committed doctors and nurses.

The passion roused by the controversy is further testament to how strongly people here feel about the NHS, regarded as perhaps the greatest triumph of Britain's welfare state since its launch in 1948, when the country was struggling mightily to keep body and soul together in the aftermath of World War II.

The service now treats 1 million patients every 36 hours, employs 1.5 million people and operates with a budget of about $169 billion, according to official statistics.

Accusations of inefficiency and waste have dogged the NHS for years, leading a growing number of Britons to buy private insurance as a substitute or fallback.

But so unassailable a place does the NHS occupy in the national imagination that Britain's political parties dare speak only of reforming and strengthening the system; any talk of abolishing it is political suicide.

And here's Kate Spall, whose mother died of kidney cancer while awaiting treatment, on how she was appalled by how her story was twisted by the lobbying group Conservatives for Patients' Rights for political purposes.

I feel I was duped," she told The Times of London. "The irony is that I campaign for exactly the people that socialized healthcare supports. I would not align myself with this group at all."

In addition to defending the NHS from conservative critics in the U.S., some in Britain have now gone on the offensive, expressing incredulity that the U.S. boasts of being a superpower while leaving tens of millions of its people uninsured. It gets worse. 17,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance. We drive up the cost of health care because we fail to provide our most impoverish citizens pre-emptive, on-going basic health care. Our current system is simply immoral.

"The United States lies between Costa Rica and Slovenia in the World Health Organization's ranking of health-care systems . . . which puts them in 37th place," Keith Hopcroft, a doctor, wrote in The Sun's commentary piece. "The U.K.? 18th. I rest my doctor's case."

I'll add my two cents. Colombia, yes, Colombia ranks 22nd in that World Health Organization survey. What does that tell you?