Their apparent addiction to hiring full time diversity officers on six figure salaries is a neuralgic one, not so much because of the scale of the waste (small)

Their apparent addiction to hiring full time diversity officers on six figure salaries is a neuralgic one, not so much because of the scale of the waste (small) but because it's so obviously waste, so easy to fix and so obviously designed purge the NHS of anyone who isn't ideologically pliant, regardless of the political cost of provoking large numbers of taxpayers and voters. But the real problem with waste (really, dysfunction) in a Soviet-style system is that it's systemic. There isn't necessarily one big thing you can point at and say "here's a big pile labelled pure waste", if it were that easy it'd be trivially fixed and nobody would care. The problem is waste at every level of the system because nobody is incentivized to get rid of it. It's things like doctors who are supposedly on-call in a hospital but who are actually "working" from home. It's things like GPs deciding en-masse that they'll not bother seeing patients anymore, because their NHS contracts pay them regardless of whether they actually let people into their surgeries or not. You can't fix this sort of thing with the NHS structure, it's impossible, governments spent most of the 20th century trying and failing. "How do you de-regulate healthcare without killing people?" The NHS is not regulation of health care. Most countries have heavily regulated but private healthcare. Perhaps you mean, how do you privatize healthcare. The answer is you just do it, and then fewer people will die. It's as simple as that. For all the shit Europeans give the USA about healthcare, a lot of it is denial. In the USA if you read an extreme story like this which ends with a 25 year old literally dying because the health system refused to serve him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63057872.amp https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-63057872.amp ... the reason is because the guy deliberately chose not to buy health insurance. It was their decision to take the gamble. Even then, in the USA you can get emergency healthcare even when uninsured. But in the UK, this guy did nothing wrong. He paid his taxes and then when he needed the system it simply wasn't there for him. Not at the GP, not at the emergency room - nowhere. As far as this poor man goes, 100% of the tax he ever paid for the NHS was pure waste, because even as he was dying of cancer the NHS refused to see him in person, told him to take a lemsip and go to bed. Now he is dead. The sad thing is, cases like that one are increasingly not a mere outlier. The NHS is gone, it's collapsed, it's failed entirely. It cannot provide even the most basic emergency health care reliably. How long will it be until other countries start recommending their citizens avoid the UK due to the inability to get emergency health care? It's probably going to take a shock like that for Brits to wake up to the catastrophic failure that the NHS model represents.