It is impossible to criticise the National Health Service in Britain without somebody summoning up the spectre of ‘privatisation’ or accusing the critic of being a covert racist who is opposed to the idea of offering sanctuary to the helpless and oppressed. For a long time now, people have felt uneasy about any negative comments about the NHS. It is fine to talk of ways in which it might be improved, perhaps by reducing waiting times, but to question the very structure of the British health service is tantamount to heresy. It is an article of faith among those born in the country that their arrangement for the provision of hospitals and doctors is the best possible and that every other nation on earth would like to adopt this system for their own country. It remains an uncomfortable fact though that since the National health Service was established almost eighty years ago, not one single country has tried to emulate it.
There are two things wrong with the National Health Service and neither of them is controversial nor at all hidden. The first is that centralised planning of the kind common to all nationalised industries, whether medicine or coalmining, is bound to be wasteful and inefficient. Those working in local villages and towns in the north of the country know the needs of their communities far better than some bureaucrat sitting at a desk in London is likely to be able gauge. Before the National Health Service, there were free health centres and hospitals which anybody could use; this was not some startling innovation introduced by a Labour government in the late 1940s!
The second thing wrong with the National Health Service is of course that it has become, to all intents and purposes, an international service. Hundreds of thousands of people use it each year without having paid a penny in taxes or National Insurance contributions. This is, to say the least of it, not a sustainable model. One can have free immigration or one can have social security benefits such as free healthcare. One or the other, but not both.
These two difficulties are combining synergistically, to bring the NHS to its knees. It will certainly collapse soon and the only real question is whether this will be a managed decline or a sudden and catastrophic failure. I have made a video about this, outlining the system which operated hospitals in Britain before the National Health Service was conceived. I think that readers may find it interesting.
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