I had to read this Washington Post wire service article (via the Sunday Greensboro News & Record) twice to make sure it wasn’t satire or sarcasm. The N&R headline reads…
British love their health care system
..then the article with a straight face goes on to list several reasons why they Brits should hate their healthcare system:
Few things unite the British like an outsider complaining about their universal health care. But within the U.K., there is widespread concern about the financial health of the NHS. Britain’s aging population, the rising cost of new technology and years of austerity have contributed to notable pressures on the system.
Britain has also had, once again, a terrible winter flu season, and hospitals nationwide are struggling to cope with the spikes in demand.
“There is widespread concern that austerity we’ve seen in the last seven years has basically put the NHS on its knees. In an attempt to drive efficiency in the system, to deliver the same for less money, we are now seeing poorer quality of care,” said Harry Quilter-Pinner, a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a London-based think tank.
“Waiting times for elective treatments, for cancer, for example, have gone up. Waiting times for GPs have gone up. Hospitals are missing targets for how long you wait at A&E [accident and emergency],” he said.
As you can probably guess, the “outsider” is none other than President Trump, who tweeted:
The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018
And while the many comments beneath the Post article did comment on the pluses and minuses of Britain’s NHS, this is the Washington Post after all, so the majority of the comments were pure Trump Derangement Syndrome. All I know is problems with Britain’s healthcare system have been documented for years. I did a Google search, and here’s the headline that struck me–via—of all places—the BBC:
NHS problems ‘at their worst since 1990s’
Problem is, the 1990s were not that long ago, folks.