Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Clearly because it's 'worked' in the past it's fine now?

We're the only non-communist nation with a nationalised health service paid for out of general taxation for a reason Damien. If it were so good do you not think everyone else would be doing it rather than single payer insurance based schemes?

Despite the money pumped into it our patient outcomes are frankly abysmal. The NHS is too big, too inefficient, we should stop with the nostalgia and accept that the rest of the world may have a point in not following our example and copy theirs - more best practise as measured by patient outcomes versus funding levels, less 'beloved NHS'. People live too long and spend too much of their lives drawing from the system without contributing to it in taxation to try and pump NHS funding up yet further to compensate for inefficiency and frankly it's rude to tax payers to accept inefficient operation and burn their money on supplying them an expensive, sub-standard health service. If a government were to actually grasp the nettle and put the case across rather than simpering over the NHS and saying how wonderful it is for all its flaws perhaps we could progress.

Change the funding method to socialised insurance rather than general progressive taxation, it's a horrid burden, change the method of operation away from the current system where the service seems to manage many of the inefficiencies of scale while failing to realise the economies, incentivise people to take private healthcare through the tax system instead of punishing them for it.

None of this is rocket science but the 'beloved NHS' is instead going to get some weird half-way house with debatable results for either efficiency or patient outcomes.

And relax.