Comments by "Helen Trope" (@heliotropezzz333) on "How The United Kingdom's Health-Care System Works" video.

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  3. The British never refer to the NHS as 'socialized medicine'. That's very much a US term. Private Healthcare in the UK relies on staff whose training has been paid for by the NHS. Also if anything goes wrong with private healthcare, the patient will be transferred to the NHS because Private Hospitals don't have Accident and Emergency Departments. The NHS tends to be a political football with various governments having different beliefs and political stances on it and it has been subjected to many 'reforms', often for political reasons, which can be expensive. This is sometimes reflected in the length of 'waiting lists' for non urgent operations for instance. Under the last Labour government (ending 2010) the NHS had the shortest ever waiting lists and the highest satisfaction survey results. When the Conservatives came to power they abolished a number of treatment targets, and for a number of years gave NHS staff no pay increases, not even to keep up with inflation, and staff vacancies and waiting lists grew. Funding was also tightly restricted during the times of 'austerity'. The Conservatives have usually favoured private medicine and privatisation of the NHS (The Conservative Health Secretary for many years after 2010 was Jeremy Hunt and he had written a paper on privatising the NHS before being appointed). The Conservative government spent £3billion on a 'reform' that created many quangos, all to push for many NHS services to be put out to contract so private providers could get an increasing share of the pie. In the current Coronavirus crisis, the government would have been lost without a national service that can rapidly pull together and co-ordinate its response but the underfunding of the service over a decade has come back to bite the government. I hope that's a lesson learned.
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