Brits Watching the Meghan and Harry Interview Were Horrified by Something Else: US Pharma Ads

The same solution should be applied to both: abolish the monarchy, abolish the US health care system

AIex Todd/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

As viewers around the world tuned in for Oprah Winfrey’s much-anticipated interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on Sunday, the reaction stateside was one of instant shock and fury. How could a family, particularly one that experienced a strikingly similar scenario nearly 25 years ago, be so relentlessly cruel? For Americans, every turn of the two-hour conversation seemed to torpedo years of public rehabilitation efforts and revealed, once more, that the royal family is an undeniably racist and outdated institution. 

Over in the United Kingdom, where officially the interview wouldn’t air for another 24 hours, those with a reliable VPN were able to participate in the much-watch television event as it aired in the US. But for Brits who had tuned in to CBS at 2 in the morning local time, a horror unrelated to the couple’s raw pain quickly emerged.

“American adverts make me feel like I’m in some post-apocalyptic world,” read one tweet. “American medical adverts are some real dystopian shit how you gonna tell me I might die,” read another. Similar sentiments, many of them captured by writer Ayesha A. Siddiqi in a remarkable thread, echoed across a country unfamiliar with the simple act of watching television in the United States, where prescription drugs are heavily advertised. For Brits watching from afar, the strange deluge of pharma adverts treated the people they were addressing not as people but as vulnerable consumers to be preyed upon. “If these medicine ads are what it’s like to not have an NHS I never want to experience that.”

Of course, that ghoulish experience is an almost uniquely American one, in the same way, that a monarchy having any hold on the public’s attention is a uniquely British affair. Other than New Zealand, the US is the only country in the world that permits direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, causing companies to promote expensive, designer drugs, oftentimes inappropriately or even dangerously to patients, just as experts have warned. In the UK, where strict rules block such adverts and prescription medicine rarely costs you more than £9, or roughly $12, thanks to the National Health Service, the notion of spending $1,200 a year for everyday drugs and life-depending medicine, as is the American way, is downright absurd. It’s no surprise then that the NHS is the one institution that is more beloved than the queen herself.

I’m an American who has lived in London for just over two years now. The practice of never having to present a form of ID, a copayment, or an insurance card upon visiting the doctor has been an equally absurd one for me. Somehow, some way, I initially suspected, I would get boned with a surprise charge down the road, as happened after too many doctor trips in New York. Though I eventually realized that those fears were unfounded, the sheer wonder at a health care system that is centralized and free at the point of use has not ceased. And I’ve felt it intensely in the past month alone after two trips to the emergency room: the first after four days of sudden and excruciating leg pain, initially suspected to be a blood clot (my GP’s fears, not mine; I had simply suspected that lockdown was finally coming for my physical well-being). Then days later, after an ultrasound failed to detect such a clot, I returned to St. Thomas’s Hospital with a new pattern of grotesque bumps that had started to accompany the leg pain overnight. (Shingles! Are! Fucking! Disgusting!) Each visit required four to five different tests; not once did I need to think about what this would cost me. The medicine I was eventually prescribed came out to a mere £4. 

It’s been an interesting thing over the past 36 hours to watch two cultures absorb the same televised event and identify deeply nefarious systems in each other. For Americans, it’s an institution that has enshrined the values of colonialism, one that wouldn’t think twice about leaving the family’s first woman of color to feel profoundly, even suicidally abandoned. For Brits, it’s an immoral and inhumane health care system that continues to rule the richest country in the world. These moral abominations are such unremarkable features of either country’s landscape that people have grown comfortably numb to them. It helps to look at them again through fresh eyes. You quickly see the same solution should be applied to both: abolish the monarchy, abolish the US health care system.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate