The Washington Post editorial board continues to challenge its progressive readers today with an editorial taking a shot at socialized medicine in the UK. As the paper notes, the UK’s National Health Service is in the midst of an annual winter crisis reminiscent of COVID. The cause this year is the regular flu which is overwhelming hospitals and causing the nation’s health secretary to warn sick people to stay home unless absolutely necessary.
The NHS has existed for years in a perpetual state of emergency. This was the case before the pandemic hit, and it has only gotten worse. Hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as “winter.” It comes around every year, yet the system, despite annual funding increases, still somehow remains unable to cope.
A campaign to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”
The Post is right about the current crisis. Wes Streeting, the UK health minister, compared the health system to a Jenga tower just two weeks ago, i.e. a system on the verge of collapse. Part of that strain is being caused by an impending strike by doctors.
Doctors’ strikes could cause the NHS to collapse over Christmas as a “tidal wave of flu tears through our hospitals”, Wes Streeting has warned.
The health service said it was facing a “worst-case scenario” this month due to an “unprecedented wave of superflu” that threatens to overwhelm hospitals at the same time as the strike…
Writing for The Times, Streeting, the health secretary, said the number of people in hospital could “triple by the peak of the pressures” and that it will be the most challenging winter for the NHS since the pandemic…
Streeting said: “The whole NHS team is working around the clock to keep the show on the road. But it’s an incredibly precarious situation, and Christmas strikes could be the Jenga piece that collapses the tower.”
The result of an overwhelmed system is what has come to be euphemistically known as “corridor care.”
The stats also showed that A&E departments are experiencing “worryingly high” levels of corridor care and demand heading into winter.
In November, some 50,468 people waited 12 hours or more in emergency departments, often on trolleys in corridors. This is the highest on record for that time of year. Some 2.35 million people went to A&E in November, the highest on record for that month.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has asked the union to call of the strike to avoid further collapse, but of course this is a perfect moment for the union to make demands.
Sir Keir Starmer accused the BMA of behaving irresponsibly and urged doctors to call off the strike, saying that “in their heart of hearts, they probably don’t want to do this”.
Speaking on a visit to Norfolk on Thursday, the prime minister said: “I’m very concerned with the action of the BMA. They are being irresponsible in my view. We have already put in place quite a significant pay rise. I’d just say to the BMA, do the responsible thing, accept the offer that’s on the table and we can all move forward.”
So it’s not just the single-payer system per se, it’s also the unionists who are a big part of the current (and recurring) problem. But unions are part and parcel of the same socialist bargain. Socialized medicine doesn’t exist without socialist unions looking to maximize their private gain from the public system. The Post calls it a “cautionary tale.”
This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare-for-all is a good idea. Both funded and run by the taxpayer, the NHS relies on rationing treatment to stay afloat. This results in patients with serious health problems forced to wait for months or years to access treatment, hoping they don’t die before the doctor sees them. Wait times get exacerbated by the politics that inevitably become intertwined when government, rather than consumers, calls the shots…
Reform is largely impossible because of a religious-like devotion to the NHS. Once someone gets an entitlement, it becomes virtually impossible to pull it back — no matter how costly or inefficient.
There’s a related story in the Daily Mail yesterday. In addition to having a Jenga tower for a health care service, the NHS is also apparently chock-full of incompetent staff. A record number were let go this year.
There were nearly 7,000 dismissals in 2024-25, according to NHS data, up nearly by double two years ago when around 4,000 were dismissed.
This is a record figure since figures were first collected in 2011.
More than half of these NHS staff were let go on ‘capability’ grounds.
That’s a lot of incompetent staffers, nearly 2% of the total number of NHS jobs. Of course any large organization is going to have a certain number of incompetent people, we can see that in our own school system where bad teachers rarely get fired once they achieve tenure. Once again, the unions are a big part of the problem.
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