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The wait is really months. Also the quality of the NHS is pretty bad. The NHS being great is the usual state-backed propaganda you can hear in a lot of other E

The wait is really months. Also the quality of the NHS is pretty bad. The NHS being great is the usual state-backed propaganda you can hear in a lot of other European countries to justify spending all that tax money on healthcare. Just from my personal experience: They skipped some safety measures they were supposed to follow during a birth delivery, they dealt terribly with one of my newborns after birth, they recommended removing 4 teeth of a 2 year old (we went private and all his teeth are fine and have been properly cleaned), they said that what we thought was a cavity was just a "discolouration" (it was a cavity, we dealt with it privately). Luckily most decent employers pay private insurance (BUPA is very popular).

exdsq 5y ago
Private health insurance is a bit of a scam for anything serious in the UK though - they don't have the ability to do anything out of the ordinary or complex and send you to the NHS hospitals when they are out of their depth.
talideon 5y ago
> Also the quality of the NHS is pretty bad. The NHS being great is the usual state backed propaganda you can hear in a lot of other European countries. Not really. The NHS itself and the various NHS trusts have been continuously drained of funding over the past few decades. The NHS runs on a shoestring. If you want things to improve, Tory cuts need to be rolled back.
- mmarq 5y ago
  The only year in which the NHS budget was cut in real terms was 97 or 98. Otherwise it has increased in real terms since 1980. Since 99, the NHS budget almost doubled. It is increasing right now, the current plan (2018-2024) increases the budget by 3.4% in real terms every year.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Is it? Unless I'm reading the following wrong: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...
- exdsq 5y ago
  I like the NHS but it is a massive cash hole. I don't believe it could ever be fixed with more money - it's already the seventh largest employer in the world in a fairly small country. The issue is in its red-tape, middle-management inflation, and odd mix of both centralization and decentralization in regards to how the trusts are split up. I have a friend who runs a nursing ward in a major university hospital and they have something like four different data entry tools to get patients information because different GPs use different tools in and out of a specific trust. Communication runs over different tools. I once worked on a project for the NHS to do with flexible scheduling using agencies to bump admin/nursing teams when needed which consisted of a csv file, without a header or documentation, appearing in a folder that would then be consumed and with some guess work actioned. This isn't a crazy example of how the NHS works, I've seen worse, but the idea that an entire hospital functioned from this undocumented unknown csv file just made my mind blow.

exdsq 5y ago

Private health insurance is a bit of a scam for anything serious in the UK though - they don't have the ability to do anything out of the ordinary or complex and send you to the NHS hospitals when they are out of their depth.

talideon 5y ago

> Also the quality of the NHS is pretty bad. The NHS being great is the usual state backed propaganda you can hear in a lot of other European countries. Not really. The NHS itself and the various NHS trusts have been continuously drained of funding over the past few decades. The NHS runs on a shoestring. If you want things to improve, Tory cuts need to be rolled back.

mmarq 5y ago
The only year in which the NHS budget was cut in real terms was 97 or 98. Otherwise it has increased in real terms since 1980. Since 99, the NHS budget almost doubled. It is increasing right now, the current plan (2018-2024) increases the budget by 3.4% in real terms every year.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
Is it? Unless I'm reading the following wrong: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...
exdsq 5y ago
I like the NHS but it is a massive cash hole. I don't believe it could ever be fixed with more money - it's already the seventh largest employer in the world in a fairly small country. The issue is in its red-tape, middle-management inflation, and odd mix of both centralization and decentralization in regards to how the trusts are split up. I have a friend who runs a nursing ward in a major university hospital and they have something like four different data entry tools to get patients information because different GPs use different tools in and out of a specific trust. Communication runs over different tools. I once worked on a project for the NHS to do with flexible scheduling using agencies to bump admin/nursing teams when needed which consisted of a csv file, without a header or documentation, appearing in a folder that would then be consumed and with some guess work actioned. This isn't a crazy example of how the NHS works, I've seen worse, but the idea that an entire hospital functioned from this undocumented unknown csv file just made my mind blow.