It wouldn’t be Christmas in Britain without an imminent threat of the health care system collapsing. This year, it was the combination of a “flu-nami” and a five-day strike by residents that had U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting warning about “the Jenga piece that collapses the tower.” That tower is the National Health Service.
The circumstances may change, but the sense of crisis is not new. The NHS has existed for years in a perpetual state of emergency. This was the case before the pandemic hit, and it has only gotten worse. Hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as “winter.” It comes around every year, yet the system, despite annual funding increases, still somehow remains unable to cope.
A campaign to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”
That messaging worked — so well, in fact, that the health service has been playing catch-up ever since. There were 6.24 million individual patients waiting to get treatment in England as of October. That’s about 1 in 10 people in the country waiting in the queue.
A stiff upper lip is one thing in wartime — and during a once-a-century viral outbreak. It’s something else when you’ve got a hernia.
This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare-for-all is a good idea. Both funded and run by the taxpayer, the NHS relies on rationing treatment to stay afloat. This results in patients with serious health problems forced to wait for months or years to access treatment, hoping they don’t die before the doctor sees them. Wait times get exacerbated by the politics that inevitably become intertwined when government, rather than consumers, calls the shots.
Despite the Labour government taking quick action last year to give resident doctors (formerly known as “junior doctors”) a 22 percent pay increase over two years, they have already gone back on strike, demanding another 26 percent increase.
The U.K. spends well above the OECD average on health care, yet its outcomes fall short of Australia, Denmark and South Korea, which spend less as a percentage of their GDPs. Reform is largely impossible because of a religious-like devotion to the NHS. Once someone gets an entitlement, it becomes virtually impossible to pull it back — no matter how costly or inefficient.
This is why practically every developed country, apart from the U.S., has adopted the principle of universal access to health care — yet practically no other country has adopted an NHS-style system. The pitfalls are too obvious. Critically, demands on the service are too great to be competently handled by the central government.
If that’s the case in a country of 70 million people, why are progressive politicians in America convinced it could work for 340 million people?
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