Britain's health service becomes poster child for travails of big government, socialized medicine

With hospitals in England near capacity and more than six million residents waiting for treatment amid a flu outbreak, the country’s debate about the future of its National Health Service (NHS) has moved from the sidelines into the mainstream.

The latest pressures fit into a long-standing trend: winter flu surges, staffing shortages, and delayed discharges are producing record waiting lists.

Senior officials and even some defenders of the NHS are questioning whether the system’s structure can withstand rising demand, demographic change, and tightening public finances strained by an aging population.

What is new is the willingness of advocates of the system to acknowledge that the NHS may be unsustainable in its current form.

In England alone, official figures indicate that in October (the latest comprehensive figures available) more than 6.2 million people were waiting for NHS treatment -- a total representing more than 10 percent of the country’s population.

Hospitals are operating at around 95-percent capacity, well above recommended levels, while thousands remain in wards even though they are medically fit for discharge because after-patient care is inadequate.

Critics of the NHS say the pressures are not only financial, but structural.

“This is what happens when the government takes taxpayers’ money and tries to run things itself,” former British Prime Minister Liz Truss told Just the News. “It simply doesn’t work, and now here we are now with some of the worst outcomes amongst wealthy countries for problems like cancer or maternity care.”

Truss, a Conservative, was a vocal critic of her country’s health care system even before serving as prime minister in 2022.

“In our system, the doctors and nurses are leaving Britain, and they’re going off to work in Australia because there are much better conditions in that country for people working in the service,” Truss said. “It’s stunning.”

Supporters of the NHS say the system acts as a critical safety net in poorer and older communities, and they resist any reform that would limit access to it.

“Millions of people without access to health insurance have very poor lives,” Nick Hulme, the retired chief executive of one of England’s regional NHS Foundation Trusts, told the BBC.

Hulme said modernization is needed -- he said the system was providing “21st-Century healthcare delivered with 1960s processes” -- but he said the NHS’s central mission of providing free, universal health care to residents should not change.

In recent years, the winter months have become an annual stress test for the chronically troubled NHS. But this year, things have become so bad that officials have begun begging residents with “less serious” ailments to stay away from hospitals, and to seek treatment instead from pharmacists or private clinics.

British media have characterized the calls as reminiscent of “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas.” Even the American media has taken note.

The Washington Post's vaunted opinion pages published a Christmas Day editorial with a headline that blared "Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter" and highlighted the failures of the NHS.

The British system is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the U.S.'s mostly private structure, with the British version overwhelmingly funded by the state.

Other major industrialized countries -- including France, Germany, and Italy in Europe and Australia, Japan, and South Korea further afield -- use some kind of hybrid system that uses government funding alongside private insurance options and parallel public and private provider options.  

Reform of the NHS was a high-profile but largely symbolic issue in the 2016 Brexit vote that pulled the U.K. out of the European Union. 

That campaign included widespread use of the pro-Brexit slogan “We send the EU £350 million a week; let’s fund our NHS instead” (the figure was around $500 million at the time). The specific claim was ultimately characterized as "misleading", but it appeared effective in swaying votes.

A decade later, similar concerns have moved from the periphery onto center stage.