> No, the welfare state doesn't receive "the largest fraction" of your taxes. Thinking this is a bit of a meme in the UK. The largest category of spending is ac

> No, the welfare state doesn't receive "the largest fraction" of your taxes. Thinking this is a bit of a meme in the UK. The largest category of spending is actually the state pension (which is partly funded by direct revenue), this isn't welfare. The actual amounts that go towards helping people who actually need help in the UK is relatively small. Hmm. On my tax breakdown from HMRC, "Welfare" comes top at ~22%, whereas "State Pensions" comes third at ~12% (Health is second at ~20%). Are you saying HMRC is wrong, or am I misinterpreting this? It does say this is just for income tax and NI, but I'm not aware of income/NI being specifically ringfenced and spent in a different way to, say, VAT. > The NHS has pretty poor outcomes for a developed country. It is provided at low-cost (interestingly, about half the size of the public health system in the US) but the results are very poor (politically, doctor's unions have had very strong lobbying, so when spending increases it has typically gone into the back pocket of doctors with output unchanged). Private healthcare is better. I'm not sure there's a consesus on this. The most charitable interpretation I can gather from skimming the research (e.g. https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6326 https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6326) is that "It's complex. The NHS does some things badly, and it does some things well, and it generally spends less than its peers". If we accept that, then the next question is naturally "what do we want to change" and "how do we do that". Maybe if the NHS spends less than its peers, we need to fund it more to get better outcomes (I wouldn't be against this)? I also don't disagree necessarily that "Private healthcare is better" for some things, but as I said elsewhere, they're not the ones who have to deal with emergency trauma cases, so it's not a like-for-like comparison.