I will just add that personal anecdotes of the NHS doing its basic job correctly are worthless, in the context of just how low the NHS can sink. This is what we have to guard against as individuals, hence my chaperone comment. If you hit the NHS on a bad day, and you have something nasty wrong with you, and you don't have a hospital chaperone, then that experience could literally kill you. To the people who have been lucky so far, fantastic, but do you think you will always be lucky? Good! I personally would not trust something as important as the rest of my life to luck. My personal bad experiences, and the bad experiences of people I know personally, span hospitals in Newcastle, Colchester, and Liverpool. They are all basically the same, and match the newspaper stories in all their unpleasant detail, patients being neglected in hospitals stuffed with indifferent staff.
Perhaps the experience of sitting with your partner, who is doubled up in agony, vomiting, who has been promised pain killers and anti-emetics, and which have still not turned up an hour later (I was watching the clock, what else can you do?) might change an opinion. Asking nurses for assistance had no effect (they were not stressed, and overworked, they just did not care, their constant yacking about everything except their hospital duties became somewhat unpleasant in this context after a while) and I was only able to see the ward manager to complain after my second request for her to see me. She inspired no confidence whatsoever. Previous and subsequent events all demonstrated that everything was an inefficient shambles at every level.
The waiting list for gallstone operations is up to ten months (dragging London into the equation of bad places to be ill), people die on the waiting list, the complications are very unpleasant. There are entire forums of people on the waiting list, trying to manage their symptoms by diet, desperate for treatment, hoping the time bomb ticking inside them will not go off. So much for free treatment for everyone, if you die on a waiting list, it is irrelevant that the treatment is free, because you did not get any. The cost of going private is around £5000, that is what rich people do without insurance. So much for free healthcare for everyone.
The French experience was a revelation, efficient, clean (all British hospitals I have ever set foot in smell dirty no matter how they look), effective. The specialist had his diary on computer, booked straight into a time slot, with availability from SEVEN days ahead, the anaesthatist was seen in advance, all relevant medical history checked out before surgery commenced. I joke about French bureaucracy, but it does the job. Patients get a personal room, and for a nominal fee the partner can sleep overnight in the same room. The NHS pays for this, but you really need to speak French to get through the process fluidly. Perhaps the French system goes wrong sometimes too, and fails patients, but the lack of a waiting list is massively important for wellbeing.
My partner is Dutch, and has worked extensively throughout Europe, and therefore knows well that UK and Dutch healthcare is amongst the worst, and that other countries are so much better. One of the big topics of itinerant Europeans is surviving British healthcare if they have to relocate to the UK.
The point that the NHS is often capable of dong its job eventually is irrelevant, this is negated by the fact that all other European countries can do this too. The clincher is that the NHS can often, through indifference and disorganisation, fail to function to the point that it can occasionally literally kill the patient. Throwing more money at this toxic culture won't fix anything, rather, it will only reinforce the bad behaviour: imcompetence leads to financial rewards. It is preposterous to stick ones head in the sand, ignore the data, and refuse to consider that alternatives might be better, this is definitely a situation where certain opinions are demonstrably misguided.
