Don't want to get involved in any arguments, but just out of interest I looked up the NHS England budget for 2020/21 - £129.9bn. (that's just the operating budget - doesn't include capital exdpenditure or Whitehall administrative costs ).The population of England is 54 million, so that means expenditure of £2,405 for each man, woman and child in England on health care in 2020/21.
In all honesty, if I was paying £2,400 health insurance per year for each member of my family, I think I'd regard NHS service as patchy at best, and less than satisfactory if I was forced to wait over 12 months for - say - a hip replacement. There's certainly scope for improvement.
That is emphatically NOT criticism of front line staff, the majority of whom are decent people doing their best in sometimes very difficult circumstances. It's a comment on the system. Monopolies, whether public or private sector, usually end up serving themselves, not their customers, because where else are their customers going to go? Captive markets serve suppliers, not customers.
Successive governments have fiddled about with NHS organisation, but none have really grasped the nettle of trying to break the monopoly and give consumers some leverage. Until one does, we'll have a service that is sometimes excellent, but often indifferent, and occasionally dreadful (South Staffs, Shrewsbury and Telford, etc etc).
(Source of budget figures -
nhs-providers-briefing-march-2020-budget.pdf )
