My 80 year old grandfather was due for a knee operation and it was delayed twice. On the day after the second time it was delayed, his knee collapsed and he smacked his head on the concrete floor. His speech was slurred, his vision was affected, and he was in extreme pain. Bearing in mind in his younger years he's had eyes slashed open and fingers cut off, so he has a high pain threshold.
The ambulance took six hours to arrive. If his brain was bleeding he would have died. When they arrived at the hospital they were waiting a further six hours to be seen.
The NHS is a tragedy and I almost wish they'd just hurry up and privatise it so I don't have to pay with it with my taxes anymore, which means the Tories achieved their goal.
If I didn't have private healthcare I'd have left the UK by now. I was born and raised here, so I think that says something.
Not that it helps, but this is happening in most Western countries.
In Canada, healthcare has similarly collapsed. Decades of mismanagement and absurd government policy finally broke the system during the COVID lockdowns and now the system is worst than many third world countries.
Like in your example, it will take hours to get ambulance and I don't mean in some rural town in Canada, I mean in downtown Toronto. Most people are just Ubering or getting driven to the hospital and camping out at the ER - and I do mean camping because it could easily be a day's wait for something fairly urgent. We've had plenty of people die in waiting rooms this year.
The worst part is there is no private system allowed here - in fact the provincial BC court recently ruled that private health clinics operating outside the public system are not allowed[1]. As a Canadian you no do not have a right to healthcare if that healthcare is private - your choice is die in the public system's waiting room or hopefully be rich enough to fly to the US for care.
> The worst part is there is no private system allowed here
This is not the worst part. The worst part is years of strategic systemic defunding and dismantling of the supports of the public system while spreading propaganda far and wide has led to a desperate public with Stockholm-syndrome wishing for private healthcare.
>The NHS is a tragedy and I almost wish they'd just hurry up and privatise it so I don't have to pay with it with my taxes anymore, which means the Tories achieved their goal.
I hear this bandied about a lot, but do you have any evidence to support this claim.
"In 2006/2007, 2.8% of NHS spending went to private providers, rising to 4.4% in New Labour’s last full year in government and 4.9% in the first year of the Coalition. About 7.6% of NHS revenue spending in 2015/16 went on purchasing care from private providers.12 In the three years from then to the Covid-19 pandemic, private spending flatlined, with the combined non-NHS spend of Commissioners and Trusts being under 8%.13 The Chief Executive of the NHS predicted in 2015 that the proportion of NHS work going to the private sector would be unlikely to increase beyond ‘the margins’.14 He has been proved right." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768211049...
From what I've read Labour was also responsible for the privitisation of healthcare.
Not that I'm personally opposed to some privitisation in a sensible manner, but the privitisation debate just seems to be some form of political attack with little grounding in reality.
Why do you say that, do you have any evidence to back it up? Not saying the US healthcare system is anything to write home about, but it always seemed to me that as long as your pockets are deep enough you should be able to get healthcare when you need it in the US.
There are some private practices that will let you pay a premium for quick appointments, but if you need a hospital, you're probably going to experience some wait.
The US isnt listed on either of the Key Data graphs? Clicking read online, and browsing to section 2.2, it seems the US doesnt fare too well in figure 2.1 (The share of people who sometimes, rarely or never get an answer from their regular doctor’s office on the same day varies by more than two-fold across countries), but does much better in figure 2.2(The share of people waiting one month or more for a specialist appointment is two-times greater in some countries than in others). I dont see the US listed in any of the other figures?
The NHS is a tragedy and I almost wish they'd just hurry up and privatise it so I don't have to pay with it with my taxes anymore, which means the Tories achieved their goal.
If I didn't have private healthcare I'd have left the UK by now. I was born and raised here, so I think that says something.