UK: We Can Do Better Than the NHS
17th July 2022
Since Covid, the NHS has struggled to return to normal. Whilst it is now seeing patients at a pre-pandemic level, the pressure is being described by senior figures as being at crisis level. If things are this bad in the summer months, the annual winter crisis — a national ritual not observed in many other first-world countries — will be much more serious still.
We should not let these acute crises obscure the fact that the Health Service systematically underperforms on key metrics: for example, it is below average internationally when it comes to preventing death from heart attacks, strokes, cancer and lung disease.
Despite this, it is fast becoming an unsupportable drain on the public finances. According to the King’s Fund, the NHS budget for England ran to £190.3 billion in 2021/22. Even before Covid, Health Service spending amounted to 7.2 per cent of GDP. By 2024, healthcare is projected to consume 44 per cent of day-to-day government spending, up from just 27 per cent in 2000.
All this despite the fact that more and more Britons are turning to the private healthcare market. Our out-of-pocket spending on medical bills is now almost on a par with America, an extraordinary failure considering that we have a high-tax, low-growth economy, with lower than average wages while forking out for universal provision.
The British NHS is the poster child for government-provided health care, and a potent reminder that the people on the left side of the IQ curve will cling to something that’s free even when it is demonstrably bad.
This is the future that the Obamacare Left want us to have.