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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I went to A&E with symptoms of appendicitis. They took me in, put me in a bed, next day I was operated on, stayed one night and out the door. Everyone was great and seemed very competent.

This was on a three-day business trip to the UK, which was extremely unlucky, but the NHS was fantastic.

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You got lucky. My father went to a&e recently with breathing problems due to some non COVID respiratory virus. He was struggling to breathe. They had zero free beds and he stayed overnight on the chairs waiting to be admitted. Eventually they found him a recliner.

And then of course you have the constant strikes and inability to even see a doctor at all unless you win the game of phone lottery.

The NHS may have a simple user interface, but it doesn't actually work when you need it so that's not very helpful. And the idea this is a Tory problem is propaganda. The NHS budget only ever goes higher yet service gets worse. Dumping ever more money into this third world system is never going to work.

Part of it is a Tory problem - when they changed how the funding gets distributed, so that overall bigger fund is divided now into smaller pieces that still have to cover the same population, but without the scaling benefits that previous allocation provided.

It's visible in other systems too, where for example you end up with local government politicians fighting for "prestige" or even perceived need to have a specific kind of hospital in their area, but they don't have a way to bring enough patients to support it, so you get a system too fragmented to sustain despite spending more and more money.

The NHS doesn't have a problem with too few patients anywhere. Just look at the chaos of the recently opened dentists that saw massive queues down the street, where police had to intervene to control the crowds. The reason: the dentist was new and accepting NHS patients.

A system that can't even provide dental slots without needing police to break up fights is a catastrophically failed system and it is a huge problem of the UK that people have loyalty to this dying corpse of a department.

It is a problem with funding when you need to break it down into smaller pieces because some very expensive things that are used by less patients now do not have support of budget for a larger area, and become an extra drain on the administrative region - because you still need to maintain neurosurgery units etc.

Suddenly there's less money for smaller, cheaper things.

And what is the alternative? For-profit systems?

Sure. Most parts of the world don't have the government run the entire healthcare system. It's an obviously bad idea everywhere To everyone except Brits.

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