Do you have any examples?
> If done properly privatisation and deregulation could just save it.
How do you de-regulate healthcare without killing people?
We already have private providers of NHS healthcare, and they usually hand the contracts back because they can't afford to do it for the money. We could experiment by paying private providers more money, but if we're doing that why not just give the money to NHS providers?
But the real problem with waste (really, dysfunction) in a Soviet-style system is that it's systemic. There isn't necessarily one big thing you can point at and say "here's a big pile labelled pure waste", if it were that easy it'd be trivially fixed and nobody would care. The problem is waste at every level of the system because nobody is incentivized to get rid of it. It's things like doctors who are supposedly on-call in a hospital but who are actually "working" from home. It's things like GPs deciding en-masse that they'll not bother seeing patients anymore, because their NHS contracts pay them regardless of whether they actually let people into their surgeries or not.
You can't fix this sort of thing with the NHS structure, it's impossible, governments spent most of the 20th century trying and failing.
"How do you de-regulate healthcare without killing people?"
The NHS is not regulation of health care. Most countries have heavily regulated but private healthcare.
Perhaps you mean, how do you privatize healthcare. The answer is you just do it, and then fewer people will die. It's as simple as that. For all the shit Europeans give the USA about healthcare, a lot of it is denial. In the USA if you read an extreme story like this which ends with a 25 year old literally dying because the health system refused to serve him:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63057872.amp
... the reason is because the guy deliberately chose not to buy health insurance. It was their decision to take the gamble. Even then, in the USA you can get emergency healthcare even when uninsured. But in the UK, this guy did nothing wrong. He paid his taxes and then when he needed the system it simply wasn't there for him. Not at the GP, not at the emergency room - nowhere. As far as this poor man goes, 100% of the tax he ever paid for the NHS was pure waste, because even as he was dying of cancer the NHS refused to see him in person, told him to take a lemsip and go to bed. Now he is dead.
The sad thing is, cases like that one are increasingly not a mere outlier. The NHS is gone, it's collapsed, it's failed entirely. It cannot provide even the most basic emergency health care reliably. How long will it be until other countries start recommending their citizens avoid the UK due to the inability to get emergency health care? It's probably going to take a shock like that for Brits to wake up to the catastrophic failure that the NHS model represents.
How would you propose managing programs to equalize quality of care across populations when conscious, unconscious, human, and automated biases exist?
This kind of easily debunkable nonsense (the NHS act came into effect in 1948) takes much away from the rest of your forceful and evidence free argument.
As for evidence free, well, how do you explain the BBC story that was presented as evidence? Or how about the 999 callout times, or the many other metrics that show the NHS has clearly broken to the point that even the most basic healthcare cannot be taken for granted? The evidence is everywhere.
The BBC story, taken at face value, shows a system that has failed the patient. Not for the last time too.
NHS needs to be compared not to some ideal setup that never fails and is cheap to run but an actual alternative.
Here the alternative seems to be US style, privitised, extract-max-value-for-the-shareholders system.
You need a great deal more than a BBC story to justify something like that
The problem here is real and the causes are clear from history - ignoring history because you don't like it is no solution. My own father now cannot get healthcare in the UK for an injury he has, point blank cannot get it. There are no appointments at the local hospital with no information on when new appointments can be booked, it takes weeks to even see a doctor at all - maybe over the phone if you're lucky. They're talking about going private but all my family members in the UK seem to thinking that at once and the UK private sector is woefully under-provisioned due to decades of near religious pro-NHS fervor and an inability to compete against tax-funded services.
The US in particular is demonized in the UK and it's dumb. Firstly, there are tons of private healthcare systems elsewhere in the world that aren't the US, it's the default mode, not an exception. Secondly, healthcare in the USA is actually excellent. If you have insurance then what's happening to my family just wouldn't occur. All the controversy in the US is around people who can't or won't buy insurance yet who don't qualify for Medicare/Medicaid, and the employer link that is a quirk of their tax code specifically. Phasing out the NHS wouldn't require the UK to bias the tax code in favor of employment-linked health insurance, and it wouldn't mean needing to exactly duplicate their benefits schemes. Those two things aren't fundamental to the private run healthcare model.
Here's a member of staff, a black man, who was attacked by a patient. He defended himself. The patient made a complaint, and the staff member was disciplined and dismissed.
He took the case to employment tribunal, claiming that the original attack was racist, and that the complaint was racist, and that the following investigation did not account for that racism and so was itself racist.
He won, because there was clear evidence that what he said was true. He got a 7 figure pay out.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/23/former-nhs-tru...
You've said that fewer people die under a privatised healthcare system - the US has worse outcomes, lower life expectancy, because of its private health care. You're simply wrong.
That guy could have got emergency health care - he could have walked into an MIU, or an ED, or he could have called 999.
> The sad thing is, cases like that one are increasingly not a mere outlier.
There's a million healthcare contacts per day. So far you've highlighted one where the patient got terrible care. It made national news because it's an outlier. Where are all the others?
> The NHS is not regulation of health care. Most countries have heavily regulated but private healthcare
You brought up de-regulation. Here's what you said:
> If done properly privatisation and deregulation could just save it.
There's no point continuing the discussion if you can't keep up with your own arguments.
The US has bad healthcare outcomes for a lot of reasons unrelated to their health care system, like obesity - a problem for the UK too. It's not due to basic, fixable stuff like "the hospital has no appointments" or "doctors aren't under any obligation to actually serve patients".
"That guy could have got emergency health care - he could have walked into an MIU, or an ED, or he could have called 999."
The 999 service that's also in collapse? He'd have been told to piss off and stop wasting NHS time because it wasn't an "emergency", as it'd already been mis-diagnosed as something trivial. He didn't realize how serious it was until it was already far too late. Why are you trying to defend this outcome? It's a terrible, atrocious end for a man who did nothing wrong, and no, this sort of thing is not an outlier. We can see it in the millions of mission cancer diagnoses.
Your last points seem to be continuing the previous confusion. You can abolish the NHS and still have healthcare regulations, although the act of abolishing the NHS is itself an act of de-regulation. It means you have fewer of them, not none.