Indeed. They slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed. A convenient narrative for politicians, but hardly truth.
They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.
Hence why having private insurance as part of the job benefits is widely appreciated, unless one is a public employee with nice health packages like ADSE.
I am approaching 50 now, and seldom ever had a family doctor for example.
However in Germany it is much worse, where public healthcare is almost managed as the private one, and where many doctor offices differ their treatments depending on which kind of insurance one has, public vs private. You get different waiting rooms, different treatment proposals, different appointment flexibility,...
Doctors triage based on medical needs not your social status or financial wealth in the Netherlands. It's one of those things that ethically sets this country above others and I hope it never changes.
For example, the UK's public healthcare funding has increased from below 3% of GDP to over 7% from the 1950s until 2018/2019 (so just before covid).[0] And yet the perception is that the NHS is always underfunded.
The UK's budget in 2018-19 was £842 billion and almost £160 billion went to essentially the NHS. I think that we will eventually have to settle into a reality of always underfunded public healthcare and it's going to get worse, because these problems plague essentially all European countries (and many others in the world).
[0] https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/full_wi...
Neoliberalism in a nutshell.