The NHS may be popular with politicians but it no longer is with the public – and with good reason, according to a new report from think tank Civitas. Tim Knox, the report author, has summarised his findings in the Spectator, and they are not kind to the once-hallowed health service, supposedly regarded as the ‘envy of the world’.
While MPs compete to shout the loudest in their support of the UK’s health services (‘save our NHS!’), the British public has fallen out of love with it. More people are now dissatisfied with the NHS than are happy with it. This is true across all ages, income groups, sexes and voters of different political parties. Support for the NHS is now at the lowest level for a quarter of a century.
The public is right, the NHS is just not that good. Compare it, as I have done in a new report published today, with the health systems of 19 similarly well-off countries and it is hard to come to any other conclusion. UK life expectancy is down at 17 out of these 19 comparable nations. Our cancer survival rates are shockingly low. We are the worst for strokes and heart attacks. We are one from bottom for preventing treatable diseases. We are third from bottom for infant mortality. The only thing we top the charts on is helping diabetics avoid amputation. Sadly, despite the great efforts of NHS staff, our health system does not match the success rates of other nations: we come bottom of the league tables four times – more than any other country – and are in the bottom three for eight out of the 16 measures.
Ah, the supporters of the NHS might say: you are just cherry-picking the countries you are comparing us with, or the diseases, or using dodgy data. Not so. The comparison countries and health outcomes were those used in a report co-published a few years ago by the three leading health think tanks, the Health Foundation, the Nuffield Trust and the King’s Fund, together with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. And all the numbers behind the health outcomes come from the extraordinarily detailed OECD health database.
So, with an unimpeachable methodology and a highly regarded database, another line of attack may be that somehow the only alternative is the American system. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one country that clearly has a worse system than the UK, it is America. Extraordinarily low life expectancy, vast costs and often poor treatment means that it would be a crazy model to imitate. But that doesn’t mean we should discount an insurance model altogether. Plenty of European and western countries are able to effectively use such a model without the massive health failures we see in the US.
Is this all about money? We hear endless accusations that ‘our’ NHS has been starved of funding. But again, not so. The OECD data are clear: in comparison to other wealthy countries, our spending in 2019 at 10.2% of GDP exactly matched the average spending of the comparable countries. For spending, if not for outcomes, we are bang in the middle of the league table.
The final claim may be that at least the NHS provides care, free at the point of use, for everyone. True of course (except for the fact that waiting lists mean that that care is rationed). But it also overlooks the fact that, again according to the OECD database, every other economically advanced country – apart from America – provides universal care to everyone.
Worth reading in full.
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There is nothing to garner from looking at different systems right now or even analysing our own..The situation is much more serious than that. It is nice that you ask the question – it shows conscientiousness but you are barking up the wrong tree entirely. Any sense of redemptive change starts with understanding the gravity of the current situation. I know it is painful and horrible but just try to keep a grip on reality.
Of course the political class know it. It is happening by design. The design that has been imposed by their paymasters. Not only that, but it has been slowly taking for at least 20 years. Only recently did the pace of destruction pick up.
In Australia too. The health system we had in the late 20th century was very considerably better than the one we have now.
“It’s nothing that more money can’t solve” say the NHS, Polly Toynbee, and the Labour Party.
“OK, how much more money then? I mean there must be a specific amount of money which would fix the problems, if money is the issue?”
*sound of feet shuffling*
I’d suggest that an organisation that allows its suppliers to sell it a pack of paper for £38, when the same thing is available in Tesco for £2.75, probably has more than enough money and needs to look at the way it is managed?
Perhaps Diane Abbott can tell us.
Odd shoes Abbott?
She’s the one shuffling her feet.
Politicians don’t use the NHS they are all on private medical care. Don’t want to mix with the riff raff, might catch something nasty.
I bet Boris’s doctor isn’t Um-Bongo from the Congo.
Racist idiot.
Oooh you get the gold star today, good boy. You called out a racist! Have a banana.
Agreed completely.
They all think they know about “economics”, but a good or service that everyone who can afford to buys an alternative to is the definition of “inferior”. That’s the NHS for you. And ever since the NHS was founded, the British “health” system has always been DUAL. Think of it the same way as “gentlemen and players” in the world of cricket. It’s in the nature of the NHS to be part of a dual system. Hence words that some may have heard such as “I can refer you privately”.
The BMA opposed the creation of the NHS. They only accepted it once the understanding was that the system would be dual and that senior medics would make money both from the state system and privately.
Also note that while members of the royal family can have NHS hospitals named after them, and they can do a small amount of propaganda work for the NHS, the extent to which they associate their brand with the NHS brand is kept highly restricted. Why? For the simple reason that “The royal family never use the NHS themselves” and “The queen always goes private” are truths that even now, in our benighted mind-befuddled times, remain fairly easy for many people to understand.
The only thing public about the NHS are, possibly the directly employed medical and nursing staff.
Everything else, the land, buildings, drugs, equipment, food, cleaning, maintenance is provided by the private sector.
The NHS and its funding model needs a ground up rethink.
If we continue to pay peanuts, we’ll continue to get monkeys.
we don’t pay peanuts, but we do get monkeys.
The problem is the funds are directed by bureaucrats (for their benefit) not by the previously healthy.
“Sadly, despite the great efforts of NHS staff”
I don’t know why people persist with this fantasy. Quality of staff within the NHS is a huge problem, I haven’t had a decent GP in 20 years, and know many people personally who have been misdiagnosed, had their concerns dismissed as minor or in their head and had delayed diagnoses due to not having the correct tests ordered etc.
not to mention doctors that can’t speak English properly!
I’ll bet you’re allocated a GP rather than able to choose, or even that better GPs could charge you more and earn more!
It’s quite possible to imagine accountability to patients inside a universal free-at-the-point-of-use state system. Note that absolutely none of the political parties proposes this. They think of the “general public” as know-nothing gobsh*tes who aren’t worth educating or empowering because they were born inferior. “Democracy” is a complete sham.
I’m afraid it isn’t
Once you subsidise ill-health you subsidise the choices that create it.
You make the healthy subsidise the feckless.
The NHS continues to remain a disaster for the economy and the population.
Precisely. People should be responsible for their own bodies – it is the natural counterpart to habeas corpus – and with massive insurance companies operating at more than national scale premiums would by now be very low. We must privatise health at once.
I had hopes for Reform but seems when it comes to the NHS, they just want to throw more money at it and tinker round the edges a little bit. Most certainly not reform in any sense….such a shame.
My wife foolishly went to see a GP about a very minor ailment a few months back. She trusted the GP’s treatment plan and the – in retrospect completely unnecessary – strong antibiotics she was put on completely fucked her gut biome, and therefore general holistic health , for weeks before she recovered. And the other thing was so minor it would have got better anyway. Both of us have lost all faith in GPs now.
You sticking with the wife though?
They made it fail.
Not they really needed to do much to achieve that.
Still a sacred cow re political ends, hence the hasty exodus for the old from hospitals to the care homes lest they old actually died of “covid” in hospital. Even the BBC might have noticed that.
Hancock et al, I hope you swing.
Utter bastards
The character of the NHS is what you’d expect in a culture where social caste is paramount:
Im currently holidaying in sunny Yorkshire and what listening to other parties conversations I’ve heard numerous people bemoan the inability to get any health care treatment and one womans little boy had a sore ear and then figure did a telephone diagnose which ended up with the boy losing his hearing on the infected ear.
Well done NHS!
That’s awful. I hope the little lad’s ear clears up soon.
Be very careful with ears. Sometimes the best thing to do is to stay away from the “health” system and use olive oil and frequent careful cleanouts, because sometimes when the system gets hold of a child with ear problems the “practitioners” can think it’s “professional” Christmas and end up damaging the child’s eardrums like nobody’s business using unnecessary grommets – a classic case of the moral philosophy of “Oh dear, look what happened after we did X.” That said, grommets are sometimes necessary, so this is definitely NOT advice on any particular case, other than “be very careful”.
Telephone diagnosis of a child’s ear discomfort is just taking the p*ss. Mind you, the GP saves on the cost of cleaning materials for his otoscope, and he doesn’t have to pay a cleaner to wipe down a waiting room after scummy old patients have sat there spreading dirt, so hey, let’s all see it from the GP’s point of view, eh?
The best that we can hope for post-apocalypse is an impoverished localism and vagueness. I think it is important to look at the best that we can hope for when it all goes down. The megadeath has already been set in motion. So where do we go from there? Do we even have the vitality to keep thing going? If we do then what are we guided by? Because if we don’t articulate an alternative vision then our masters will say that we were ripe for killing.
It is grand visions that got us here in the first place. We’ve had quite enough of them.
It was understood centuries ago. Leave people to figure out solutions to their own problems with a basic set of laws in place to handle the big ticket items, thou shalt not kill etc. You pay a modest tithe to ensure those basic items are enforced and the rest you keep.
Most of our modern problems come from a colossal bureaucratic state; locking us down being an obvious example. Yet our amazing culture emerged from a system much like the one outlined above.
Yes it is always in spite of not because of. However in the current situation I do not see a subversive or counter-cultural movement carrying the species forward. The demoralisaton is almost complete. There is no pathway out of this. No band of rebels or set of intellectuals to pull up upwards. What would be the new impetus or charge? What would the best of us get behind? There is no vision just the vision of Thanatos.
Don’t worry.
Us unjabbed will soon be top dogs.
And that’s what really worries TRPTB.
Mind you. how many of the bastards have actually had it, given the fact that so few seem to have been affected.
In that regard, one can only hope…Macron, Trousseau et al.
The amount we spend used to be less, around 8% I think, but that was before Thatcher introduced Trusts and all the bloody accountants to count the beans, f**k al knowledge of medicine but they now run things and draw obscene salaries bleeding the NHS dry in the service of feathering their own nests.
That and the fact that the criminal idiots who believe exclusively in the germ theory, a.k.a. the pharmaceutical industry, control most of the medical training facilities and the K.O.Ls at the head of our finest medical institutions/universities.
The system is now completely broken with only a few fragments where talented independently minded real doctors still manage to provide, against all odds, patients with proper ‘doctoring’.
Go and have a read of the recent editorial over at the BMJ on the corruption of medicine, or read Malcolm Kendrick on how the QOF and NICE created the perfect storm to destroy swathes of medical practice, aided and abetted by the Spanish Inquisition of the GMC.
It’s rubbish to assume that most countries operate an insurance system. It’s about 50/50%. Switzerland is all insurance-based, Iceland and Sweden both seem to be all tax-funded, like ours.
However, the difference seems to be that other health systems, well except maybe South Korea’s, are much more devolved. England’s command-and-control model is leading to the same inefficiencies as were seen in the former Soviet Union; see Malcolm Kendrick’s latest blog.
I think decisions are best made at the lowest possible level. This could be done in a public or private system.
The majority of countries with a 1st world health service operate a Social Insurance model of healthcare with lots of variety / consumer choice built in:
Austria, Switzerland, Germany Holland, France, Singapore, Japan, Australia for example.
They are not all private- charidees, local friendly societies, unions & local authorities are all in the mix of health provision.
Germany did find a while back that the best health outcomes were from its private hospitals rather than the charity or local authority operated ones.
Decisions are best made at a local level- agreed- this is more likely where the public funding doesn’t morph into state control.
‘The best health outcomes were from its private hospitals’
That could be because private hospitals choose which patients they treat.
I’d be very interested in knowing, for every country in the list, what proportion of the medical workforce is:
1) Indigenous;
2) Non-indigenous but born and educated in that country; and
3) Immigrant.
Things that all medics in the country know:
While we are talking about the NHS, does anybody else remember the “false NHS consent form” that opponents of the anti-SARSCoV2 “vaccination” campaign circulated to British schools to try to inform parents about the risks that such “vaccination” poses to children? There was a minor media scandal about it. Officials had to issue warnings. I think perhaps a number of headteachers, who were clearly completely ignorant about psychological warfare, had made the error of posting copies of the “fake form” itself to Twitter. (Ha!) So the operation had a certain amount of success.
Anyway…I read a newspaper article at the time that quoted a medic – I think he was some kind of regional public health official, or maybe he was in the “education” system – who said that his message to parents of school pupils was that what was written in the document was “not for you“.
I thought his use of that expression was extremely revealing.
Unfortunately I didn’t keep a copy of the article and have been unable to track it down. If someone can put their finger on it, I will be so grateful if you could post the exact chapter and verse.
That’ll be the “false information” from tinfoil hatted antivaxxers that was subsequently proven to be correct?.
Yes, that’s right. They did a very effective job with that operation – using headteachers’ stupidity (and in particular their tendency to whinge and to post to Twitter) against them and also roping in unwitting news editors too. The “vaccine” defenders’ attitude was “Oh look at this hellish psychological warfare we’re being hit with by persons unknown. Look at this document these anti-social saboteurs have written – it appears almost exactly like a genuine document, so make sure you don’t get influenced by it, because it’s all terrible lies.” They were utterly clueless about PW. There must have been many readers who thought “Wow, that’s interesting – is that statistic about the risk to children true?”, before doing a bit of research and discovering that yes, it was indeed true – and then going on to question other stuff too.
I’m sure those in the state who are responsible for controlling the opinions of headteachers (in this case advised by the military, surely, or actually in the military) must have “issued some advice” by now (“This must never be allowed to happen again” – haha), but there is an extent to which “against stupidity, even the gods battle in vain”. They can hardly stop schoolteachers whingeing. They can of course tweak a few things inside the Twitter structure itself (there are military PW types working inside Twitter), but that doesn’t mean it will be easy.
It was such a well-done operation that the guys and gals who conducted it are also easily sufficiently competent to learn lessons from the won battle and to remain at least one step ahead of the opponents (I suspect).
It shows what can be achieved when good people use their brains.
Anyone who thinks that what I say about Twitter working with military psychological warfare operatives is fanciful codswallop might usefully start to wise themselves up by reading an article such as this one:
This is much more interesting stuff than whether Elon Musk will or won’t take over formal ownership of Twitter or whether the company will or won’t unban a certain narcissistic failed casino-owner of a billionaire in the USA.
Since the 6th April we’re paying 1.25% more out of our wages to pay for this shower.
Fire every diversity official.
Cull the bureaucrats.
Cease treatment of international health tourists.
Ban trans surgery.
Stop painting zebra crossings with LGBT colours.
Nobody earns more than the Prime Minister.
Bring back Matron.
Stop nursing degrees, return to traditional training.
After the First world War it was the Representation of the Peoples Act, 3.8 million men coming back from the War to end all Wars..they gave ‘the people’ ‘Democracy’…after the Second War..they gave ‘the people’ the National Health Service..The powers that be are not afraid of ‘the people’ anymore, and now they are taking all that power back.
They “gave”? They cleverly transferred lots of money from taxpayers to them. The NHS was always a bad idea rooted in the false claims that bureaucrats will make things efficient.
Even if the NHS were the greatest health service ever it would still be toe curlingly inappropriate to raise a government department to the status of a state religion. But then perhaps that it at the root of its failure, making it a sacred cow that cannot possibly be considered for reform.
The NHS is all over isn’t it? What ‘Health Control Command Centre’ monster do they plan to replace it with?
Entirely unofficial, but was watching a journalist (can’t recall his name, but from a group styling them selves Journalists Against COVID Censorship, or something similar) interviewing a spokeswoman from the People’s Health Alliance. They are assembling themselves into some sort of alternative health care advisory group, planning to set up hubs in as many places as possible. It will no doubt take some time to organize and they are putting out a call for interested practitioners, but they launched their website on 23 April, I gather, and have a social media presence on several platforms including Telegram.
Where there is a need, something will emerge – I hope this initiative succeeds.
For me the problem is too many managers topped by the diversity group paid hundreds of thousands in some cases, for the most diverse organisation in the country. Madness.
Plus being completely obsessed with covid. 50% of seats cordoned off in waiting rooms, wards still not fully occupied, outpatient services restricted to create space between people, still no visitors in quite a few hospitals etc etc.
Its not about money, its about poor organisation.
Once again – if our hallowed NHS to which all else must be sacrificed is the envy of the world, why has no other country in the world tried to copy it?
We need to get rid of bodies. They are so analogue, so obsolete, so out of date. We need shiny new digital bodies that can be upgraded as required, automatically connect to the wifi without needing a separate device, and a few cool features like 360° swivel knees, optional gender with plug in plug out genitalia and Xray vision. Hopefully Elon has that sorted as part of the Twitter deal.
”Do the politicians?”
Let’s have three guesses, shall we…..?
“But that doesn’t mean we should discount an insurance model altogether. “
What I find amusing about that argument is how engaging thousands of pen pushing insurance claims clerks and all that financial administration improves matters.
It doesn’t because it can’t.
The fact that the NHS system is moribund and trapped in entropy has nothing to do with the single buyer approach.
Adding an insurance system on top of that will just bog it down even more – as the American system shows.
The structural problems are deeper than a devout belief in ‘free markets’ will cure.
Nothing new or surprising here, the NHS needs restructuring from the ground up. It’ll never happen as it employs so many people, and they have a vested interest in retaining the status quo. No government will have the bottle to deal with this. Eventually it will implode.
The NHS is the Leyland of healthcare. A fly blown dump. A bureau-rustbucket. A soviet style cesspit. Time to privatise and damn the squeals of the vested-interest left.
Have you not watched what has been happening in the USA?
They are in an even worse state than we are.
Private healthcare as the only option would be disastrous.
Get rid of NICE, set up some co-operative or CIO local hospitals for the less serious and recuperative cases, expand the walk in hubs and make them more efficient. Reduce management and admin in NHS make sure the measures they use are focussed on what matters to the public (better care, faster recovery and lower death rate). Give doctors back the ability to choose the treatment even of that goes against NICE and in particular the ability to use off label treatments.