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> comically dysfunctional intentionally dysfunctional.. there has been a multi-decade effort to prep the NHS essentially for complete privatization

• native_samples 5y ago
  You mean the multiple decades that included a left wing Labour government, the same party that set up the NHS? A post-2008 crash spending freeze from which the NHS was exempt? The decades of huge budget increases? The NHS is not intentionally dysfunctional any more than the USSR was. It's dysfunctional because the state cannot run large, complex operations regardless of how hard it tries. It's because the NHS is a top down command and control economy and those have never worked, in any period of history. It's because without competition the inevitable result is decay and steadily advancing institutional incompetence (paired with financial incontinence). That's why successful countries have economies based on free competition and why even China had to adopt it via Deng Xioping's reforms in the 1980s. The NHS is an embarrassment to the UK and I say that as a British citizen. No other country has ever sought to emulate it because it is bad. The quasi-religious fervor with which it's viewed by the left occurs because it's an obsolete institution that nobody in their right mind would ever even consider proposing in the modern era, and they know it. If the NHS and BBC go then there would be no more socialist institutions beyond, perhaps, universities.