The UK’s socialist national health program is reportedly “broken” and suffering the “biggest crisis in its history,” the government says.
According to NBC News, the suffering arises from: rising prices, stagnant wages and crumbling public services.
NBC News doesn’t mention the influx of unproductive foreigners who have to be tended to now. They do say 20% of their healthcare workers are foreigners.
Now the Labour Party, which created the then-radical [and still radical] NHS in 1948, is battling its own economic constraints and record-setting unpopularity. It has a colossal task if it is to fix the crumbling hospitals replete with overworked doctors and bed-lined corridors, says NBC.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer must turn around a behemoth whose budget of 200 billion English pounds ($269 billion) represents some 40% of all government spending, and whose 1.4 million employees are the world’s seventh-largest workforce. In the United States, only the Department of Defense, Walmart and Amazon outnumber it, NBC reports.
NBC News said everyone has a success story of the system, but then they admit the horror stories exist.
But just as common are the tales of maddening, hours-long waits in overstretched emergency rooms, or weeklong delays just to see a community general practitioner. Many critics blame the sprawling crisis on years of underfunding by the now-ousted Conservative government of 2010-2024, whose response to the 2008 financial crisis was to make drastic cuts to public services.
40% of government spending was austerity???
Though the concept remains revered, public satisfaction in the NHS in practice cratered to 52% in 2023 from a high of 70% in 2010, according to the King’s Fund, a top think tank tracking British health care.
According to NBC News:
The crisis at the NHS coincides with an uptick in hostility toward immigrants — even though they are often people’s doctors, nurses and hospital cleaners. Almost 20% of NHS staff have a non-British nationality, with Indians, Filipinos, Nigerians, Irish and Poles making up most of their number. “It doesn’t work — it’s not working,” Farage told NBC News’ British partner Sky News in May. “We’re getting worse bang for the buck than any other country, particularly out of those European neighbours.”
It’s not the needy illegal immigrants getting free healthcare and not producing anything?
Nigel Farage of Reform UK said the system doesn’t work, but NBC News cut his statement off.
NBC admitted:
“Corridor care” is now a year-round crisis, and the number of people waiting 12 hours or more to be admitted into an emergency room rose from 47 in summer 2015 to 74,150 this summer. Targets have lagged for years in everything from ambulance attendance times to cancer diagnoses. Meanwhile, a 7 million-strong waiting list means many people feel abandoned for months, in pain, before getting hip or knee replacement and other types of surgery.
Then they blamed the conservatives again. They didn’t spend enough. 40% of the revenue they take in wasn’t enough.
Starmer will raise spending 3% and taxes.
This is the direction the ACA, aka Obamacare is taking the US. This report should be a cautionary tale.
Just like Canada’s, where they would rather help you kill yourself then cure you.