NHS is overwhelmed every winter if the hyperbolic headlines are to be believed
There was a good piece in the private eye a few years ago listing headlines saying the NHS is doomed tomorrow going back to before Blair.
https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641
>Just to flesh this out, the NHS could use more money, but it's worth saying that it's the only European healthcare system I'm aware of so fragile.
You've fallen for the very "NHS is more fragile than systems in other countries" mantra that the Private Eye piece mocks. COVID19 has overwhelmed the French, Belgian, and Italian systems too.
>If you ask a lot of British people they seem to think that the only alternative is the wild west found in the US, rather than the other healthcare systems in Europe.
The NHS is unique in being so unified. I'm not sure there's another European country in which one government entity runs insurance, billing, and delivery. Because the UK is the foreign country Americans are most exposed to (Canada doesn't count), this results in both Americans and Britons thinking that all healthcare plans outside the US are like the NHS, when actually the norm is something closer to that of France, Germany, or the Netherlands.
Government running every aspect of healthcare means that every aspect of healthcare is a political issue. The consequent level of weaponization of the NHS in British political rhetoric is flabbergasting. It's said that Social Security (the US version of UK National Insurance) is the "third rail" of American politics—any politician that touches it gets electrocuted—but there is no comparison. I, for one, have no desire whatsoever to ever experience the US equivalent of how in the UK the NHS is always, Always, ALWAYS the #1 or #2 topic of every single election, with every candidate competing to outdo the others in promising that the NHS will "always be free" and that he is the only candidate who can make sure that the local GP's surgery hours will widen and that the A&E will no longer be "the worst in England" or "the second-worst in Yorkshire". The Private Eye piece is the result of the above.
(Canada, also with a single-payer system, sensibly divorces billing from providers. As in the US private entities deliver most healthcare, and in both countries if one's doctor has inconvenient hours or if the local hospital has substandard care, one simply goes to another as opposed to having this being something politicians are expected to fix.)
I think Denmark apparently has the most comparable system in Europe, but I've not read much about it (just heard it in passing).
NHS does well in the Commonfund healthcare comparisons (https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/other-publicat...), especially given how small a share of UK GDP healthcare spending is. That's certain an argument for its unitary, top-down structure. That same integration, however, makes it vulnerable to the sort of political grandstanding that Private Eye satirized.
It has money.
Winter pressure this year, no matter how you count it, is considerably worse than it has been in the past.