I personally get the sense that it's quite easy for the NHS to look good when you compare it to America. When you compare to other western countries the result

I personally get the sense that it's quite easy for the NHS to look good when you compare it to America. When you compare to other western countries the results don't always seem so great and there are definately situations where as an outsider I think things are clearly pretty bad (like NHS IT system procurement). I don't hold out much hope for reasoned debate to help things though - who can form a reasonable opinion about ~6% of GDP directly managed by the Department for Health? I certainly can't.