The UK's NHS - Bureaucratic Health Care at It's Finest

The United Kingdom has the super-version of Socialized Medicine that the Left loves, Single Payer. The government pays for all of your health care. The result? You can't get health care.

Or you can't get health care when you need it. Wait times are legendary, so people are turning to private health care. Lord Kinnock’s £2bn VAT raid would crush the NHS

Many people are indeed turning to private healthcare, Lord Kinnock is right about that. He also correctly identifies the reason behind this being the long waiting lists, which have now become a permanent feature of the NHS. [SNIP]

It was reported last year that almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds are opting to pay for a GP appointment in order to beat the waiting list on the NHS, with the total number of people going private to see a GP approaching four million.

You don't have to pay for health care. Well, that is the Left's advertising. You do pay through taxes. And the largest bureaucracy in the country doles out the funds. The result is that you can't get health care. Not free health care anyway. So you end up paying twice.

Speaking of wait times. Accident & Emergency wards, what we call Emergency Rooms on this side of the pond, have legendary wait times. People don't respond well to waiting. A&E waits fuel 4,000 attacks on NHS staff a year: One worker is attacked every two hours in 'tinder box' hospitals as nurses face violence and gun threats

Gun threats in Gun-free England? How can this be?

NHS staff are facing 'utterly abhorrent' levels of violence in A&E – with one worker attacked every two hours, damning figures reveal today.

Middle-class patients and their families are among those driven to rage by long waits and dehumanising care in corridors, the Royal College of Nursing said.

Nurses are fed up and considering an "industrial action." That would be a strike. Nurses in England's NHS take step closer to industrial action over pay. Low pay is an issue.

As many as 500,000 National Health Service nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were on track to join resident doctors in taking industrial action over pay after voting to reject a 3.6% rise offered by the government.

The nurses rejected the offer "overwhelmingly" in a union ballot because it was below, not only that offered to their colleagues in Scotland and resident doctors and consultants, but also other public sector workers such as teachers, prison officers and the military, according to the BBC and The Telegraph.

You want that bureaucracy to spend money on front-line workers? You haven't had much experience with the bureaucratic mentality, have you.

There are more problems.

• Scotland getting fed up with their version of NHS, where misdiagnosis is becoming a problem due to doctors being rushed. One in three Scottish residents believe the NHS is not sufficient
• Allegations of corruption, or incompetence. NHS kept using firm behind £6m corruption scandal for three years
• Severe under-staffing leads to death. NHS official admits ‘what we did wasn’t enough’ for 14-year-old who died at mental health hospital

In short, the National Health Service of the United Kingdom is not the wonderful vision of a "cost free" health care system that the Left loves to paint is as being. It is a large bureaucracy creating red tape and delay. If you happen to die because of that delay, well it isn't clear to me that isn't a feature.