Socialized Medicine Is Failing in Great Britain

How is that socialized medicine working out? We recall, with some chagrin, that sad day in 2012 when Great Britain, hosting the Olympic Games for the third time, produced a song and dance number extolling the greatness of its National Health Service. We recall an absurdist dance of patients, doctors and hospital beds. The nation had somehow lost its creative spark.

Anyway, at the time when Americans were being instructed to embrace Obamacare, and where some strange souls insisted that it was a step toward socialized medicine, its defenders argued: it works so well in Great Britain, so why should we not try it over here.

If so, they spoke too soon. Now, the NHS is failing in its task. It imposes unconscionably long wait times for the most routine procedures, and even for some not-so-routine services.

The result, dutifully reported in the Guardian-- not a piece of the right wing media-- is that more and more people are going private. That is, they are buying private insurance and even paying out of pocket for more prompt and more effective medical care. Thus, once-Great Britain is instituting a two-tiered medical system-- one that, horror of horrors, resembles nothing if not the American way.

Growing numbers of Britons are paying for private medical treatment in a shift that could undermine the NHS and create a “two-tier” health system, a report has warned.

Declining access to and quality of NHS care, both worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, have begun to “supercharge” the trend, with one in six people prepared to go private instead of waiting.

That is among the findings of a report by the left-leaning IPPR thinktank, which warns that in future getting fast, high-quality care on the NHS could become as difficult as the situation that already exists in regards to state-funded dental treatment, which has become a postcode lottery.

“People are not opting out of the NHS because they have stopped believing in it as the best and fairest model of healthcare,” said Chris Thomas, the IPPR’s principal research fellow and co-author of the report.

“Rather, those who can afford it are being forced to go private by the consequences of austerity and the pandemic on NHS access and quality, and those without the funds are left to ‘put up or shut up’.”

The report says that unless the NHS starts performing better “people who can and are willing to do so will supplement their entitlement to NHS care with private healthcare products”.