People in the UK believe that the NHS provides them with cost-effective, comprehensive medical cover, free at point of use. It doesn’t. It is an inefficient system, the subject of much pertinent criticism. The NHS pays for itself by allowing treatment times to become unacceptably long, and even when the waiting-time figures look good, they should still shock. “Rationing” of health service services operates in a variety of ways, from the obvious waiting-lists to the fact that NHS doctors are trained, from the earliest days of their medical degrees, to rely more heavily on probability in their diagnoses, rather than thorough investigation.
More and more, it is becoming clear that the NHS simply won’t provide some life-saving treatments. This ought to cause us all to re-evaluate what we want the NHS to be, or how it should be run. But one way or another, it needs urgent, radical reform.