TV star salutes care given to his son Henry and says Trump will ‘divvy up’ NHS if Tories win election

The actor and writer Rob Delaney has shared a video praising the NHS and calling it “the pinnacle of human achievement”.

Delaney, co-star of the Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe, says he is “crazy” about the NHS in the clip, shared on Twitter.

The American actor, who is a vocal supporter of Labour, compared the experiences of being treated by the US private healthcare system when he was in a car accident when he was 25 with the “extraordinary care” his son Henry received from the NHS when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour before he died.

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In the video, he asks British voters to imagine him as a “ghost of Christmas future” and as someone who has experienced a private healthcare system in the US, but who has “also experienced the wonderful NHS here, which even in its underfunded state is still so vastly superior”.

He added: “You don’t want what I grew up with.”

He went on to explain that 17 years ago he was in a car accident and was badly injured and had to have surgery.

“Under the American private healthcare system my insurance company, when I started to generate big bills because I had been in a car accident, they just dropped me, and I became responsible for tens of thousands of dollars in bills. And that was terrifying at the age of 25,” he said.

Speaking about the illness and death of his son, Henry, he said it was not the outcome they had wanted because his cancer had progressed.

“But throughout the 21 months that he was under the care of the NHS, the care that he received and that our family received was truly unbelievable. As far as I can tell, the NHS is basically the pinnacle of human achievement,” he said.

Delaney went on to say that “the NHS is going to be on the table” if “we leave the EU under the terms of Boris Johnson’s disastrous Brexit deal”, adding that “Donald Trump is going to give it to Donald Trump Jr and Eric and Ivanka and they’re going to divvy it up and sell it to private pharmaceutical companies, and the NHS as we know it will be gone.”

Earlier this month the US president made assurances that the NHS will not form part of post-Brexit trade deals.

Speaking to Nigel Farage on LBC radio, Trump told listeners he was not interested in buying the NHS and denied Corbyn’s claims it would mean the NHS was up for sale to American health corporations.

“I don’t even know where [it] started with respect to us taking over your healthcare system. I mean, it’s so ridiculous. I think Corbyn put that out there, but to even think, it was never even mentioned, I never even heard it until I went over to visit with the Queen,” he said.