Why the UK’s NHS is Failing
The UK’s NHS is failing – it has a waiting list of 7 Million people as of 2023 and still climbing – that’s more than 10% of the UK’s entire population is sick enough to need hospital treatment yet remains untreated!!
It’d be even higher if young people didn’t generally have good health and not need treatment.
My ex-girlfriend has been on the NHS waiting list for over 3 years at this point. I don’t even bother to get my training injuries seen to most of the time, and have had to go private on various occasions.
You are almost medically uncovered when you live in the UK.
People are quick to blame this on one government party or the other, as if the other party would do much better, while citing that ever more funding would fix it, but the problem goes much deeper than that.
The NHS is the Biggest Employer in Europe
The NHS is already the biggest employer in Europe, with 1.3 Million staff.
1.3 Million staff is not only not clearing that waiting list of 7 Million people, but the list is actually grew by another 1-2 Million people after covid lockdowns had ended, so you can’t even blame lockdowns!
The NHS is a Black Hole for Money
The NHS is a black hole for money, costing £180 Billion – that’s 4x bigger than the national defence budget of £45 Billion.
For a population 67 million, that works out to around £2700 per person per year… including all the millions of people who don’t claim any treatments.
This is around average for OECD countries but less than other G7 countries, however many of the other countries with this similar expenditure have far better healthcare. How is this possible when UK taxation is so high? You’ll see further down.
Many people are forced to go Private anyway
Those that can afford private healthcare avoid using the NHS, with hundreds of thousands of people going private.
Even NHS doctors recommend to go private in person. Obviously they’d probably get fired if they tweeted this.
Corruption is not being able to say the truth publicly without negative consequences.
Dentistry
Despite the huge expenditure on the NHS, when you need dentistry, it’s common for many people to be forced to go private because they can’t find an NHS dentist willing to take any more patients or bookings within a reasonable time.
NHS dentistry isn’t even “free” via your already paid taxes – it’s merely a subsidized rate which you still have to pay eg. a tooth filling on the NHS will still cost you £70 vs £100-120 privately.
Even with the same dentists who do a mix of private and NHS work, you may be seen in a couple days privately or spend weeks waiting for NHS treatment.
This is how dentists get you to pay more than the partly government subsidized rate. And when you have a pain in your tooth affecting everything in your life, your work etc, who can wait weeks. You just pay regardless.
TaxPayers would get better treatment if they spent their tax money themselves
In many cases, taxpayers would be better off not paying the extra social security taxes towards the NHS for a bloated government system and instead buying private treatments with that same money.
Why Doesn’t the NHS Work with so much Money and Manpower?
Government workers are among the laziest in the entire UK.
I’ve worked at many, many places over the decades and seen first hand that government workers in different places I worked were by far the laziest and least productive.
You can see this in the slow pace at any NHS hospital or GP surgery.
There is no sense of urgency or productivity in wanting to clear waiting queues or solve problems as you find in private companies.
You can see this in other government departments too. One Indian guy I know who was working at one of the departments basically said they’re the English rejects from the corners of the UK that can’t get hired in private companies.
He’s since founded a company to sell services to the government and became a millionaire within 3 years because the system is so incredibly useless that people figure if those idiots are being paid, they might as well take a cut because the system doesn’t work properly anyway, and they might deliver a little more.
No matter how much money you pour into UK government departments, it ends up in the pockets of those who know the GCloud procurement system and how to siphon it off via outsourcing companies.
Big Government = Big Wastage
How different an experience is Private Treatment?
Private treatment is very fast and efficient. It tends to be run more like a regular company, because there is competition and they only get paid to perform work, so they are forced to be more efficient.
They are not merely clocking on and off, they have to be economically productive.
When you report your need for medical help to the NHS, you can expect to wait for months for every iteration.
When I’ve gone private, I was seen within a couple days, and the staff get to it and finish. They are not killing time watching the clock and plodding around slowly.
Many foreigners I know in the UK fly home to get private treatment in cheaper countries to avoid the problematic NHS and its years long waiting lists.
Why Can’t TaxPayers just vote for Lower Taxes and self-fund Private treatment instead an NHS that isn’t serving for them?
Half the voting age population don’t even pay income tax.
TaxPayers couldn’t fix the system even if they wanted to – they don’t have the voting power left because of universal suffrage.
It would also leave the non-taxpaying half of the population without any medical cover.
Also, the NHS is deeply intertwined with UK identity and ideology – it would be like shutting down the BBC (not a bad idea actually).
Can NHS Working Practices Be Reformed to Just Work Harder or Be More Productive?
The NHS staff population is a large voting block, so that might be political suicide.
What next, cutting multiple reception and administrative staff in favour of more doctors and nurses? Those barely-paying-any-taxes-receptionists are voters too.
One young Pakistani friend of mine in his twenties is a doctor in the NHS. He works as a “temporary” locum working at the same hospital, earning triple what he would make as a permanent staff doctor.
This bleeds the NHS budget, but the fact the NHS can operate this way shows that it’s not just a money problem. They’re paying him roughly £10k a month, a huge top 2% income for the UK, and hospital administrators are on 6 figure salaries, and yet the NHS is in this condition where people are not being treated, because paying people more to incentivize them to work harder doesn’t work either.
The problem is systemic to being a government run institution, throwing more money won’t solve it and the culture is hard to change when you need those workers to vote for you to get re-elected.
The UK is Over Populated
UK population density is 5x that of the USA.
UK mass immigration of millions of people in the years since Blair relaxed immigration rules has put immense strain on public services ranging from the NHS, to roads, to schools, to rent and house prices. In short, UK immigration has been a disaster for the existing population.
This is what caused the Brexit referendum result – people were desperate to stop any more immigration, even blue eyed white immigration from Europe, which shows it was not a race issue but an economic issue.
Yet the NHS heavily relies on nurses from Africa, because the economics in the UK were already failing, driving English nurses away. Catch-22.
Even if recent immigrants didn’t claim any NHS treatments to add to the huge queues, their mere existence in the UK has pushed up the cost of living and disincentivized people, driving away the more productive and leaving the less productive or those with weak options to leave.
The real pandemic is Feminism & Universal Suffrage
This has resulted in the following outcomes:
- High Taxes
- Feminist Divorce Laws & lowest marriage rates in history
- Low Birth Rates
- Mass Immigration
- Government permanent budgetary deficits, which historically usually only happened during times of war
- Inflationary Money Printing – because even high taxes can’t cover bloated universal suffrage government spending deficits
- Taxes paid mostly by men for welfare state benefits given mostly to women
- $150,000 net loss to the state per woman on average over the course of her lifetime
The UK’s Political System is in Decline and Can No Longer Solve Problems due to Universal Suffrage
Universal suffrage has pushed the entire political spectrum ever more leftwards over the last several decades in both the US and UK. This has resulted in many changes ranging from feminist divorce laws to ever higher tax rates.
Governments today are more concerned with rainbow colors and bending over backwards for inclusion initiatives than solving real problems. That is because you need inclusivity to hoover up as many votes as possible to win elections.
Politicians are trapped in this system as much as the rest of us. Good honest people are less likely to win votes under this system or be able to solve problems without upsetting one of the many special interest groups.
The best and the brightest do not want to waste their lives going into a political system where their hands are tied and they are likely to lose to liars and vote buyers who can appeal to the non-contributing segments of the voter base.
It hardly matters which party you vote for under this system, because they’re more or less the same. People are calling it “managed decline” – you can pick which party you think will decline the country faster or slower. That’s all.
