It feels strange to me that while experts are saying there is a crisis at the bottom of the article, the start of the article spends quite a lot of time on a lady that has a very fast growing tumour and had two mammograms cancelled due to covid.<p>Presumably, the writers thought that was a more impactful story, and added a human touch but to me it signals the opposite. What would the new policy be "don't have pandemics"? Even with 20/20 hindsight, I'm not sure what could be done differently for this particular case.<p>The only real obvious one is "Her cancer was growing quickly, she was told, but it would be eight weeks before a mastectomy could be scheduled to remove her breast."<p>But, presumably the people to do the operation were booked out for those 8 weeks with operations for other people with serious cancer issues.<p>Possibly the system is totally broken and they randomly assign appointments based on star-signs, but they don't actually tell us anything like that, just that everything is busy due to Covid.<p>And presumably that applies to everything medical, not just cancer or mammograms or mastectomies. If it was just one specific region, or specialism, that would be a much more tractable problem.
Not from the UK but acquaintances from London pretty unanimously agree that NHS is great value as long as it is nothing urgent, but akin to Russian roulette for serious operations. Would say in Switzerland(where there is a weird version of universal healthcare) where I am this also kind of holds true, but 2 years is unthinkable here
I'm 100% pro-Obamacare, as it gave me access to options I didn't have before (medical insurance for pre-existing condition; I have Cystic Fibrosis). However, in the lead up to its passing, one of the (undoubtedly biased and leaning) articles I read in those days was a discussion in how long it took CF patients to get care in the UK (as critics were trying to make a flawed 1:1 comparison). I also know that many of the revolutionary drugs that have come out for CF had significant delays before becoming available in the UK.
The problem with state-run healthcare is that right-wing parties will always sabotage it when they are in power. The “government can't work” narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You see this particularly obviously in the United States, but similar things happen with every state service in pretty much every democratic state.