Politicians who yearn for taxpayer-financed universal health insurance might have second thoughts, if they comprehend the message in John O’Sullivan’s latest article for the print version of National Review.

In “Risky Operation,” O’Sullivan discusses the impact of socialized medicine on the British health care system. He mentions the increased waiting time, the deterioration in quality of care, and the other unintended consequences.

He also focuses on the politics:

Though Mrs. Thatcher was massively expanding government spending on health care ? it rose 40 percent in her first two terms before her 1987 health-reform package ? she was denounced for starving the NHS [the National Health Service Britain adopted in 1948]. Though false, this was credible: The Tories were genuinely more skeptical of the value of socialized medicine and Labour was seen as its progenitor. The alternative to blaming Mrs. Thatcher was to blame the NHS itself ? and that was unthinkable. She survived that bullet, but eventually it found its mark. In 1997 Tony Blair was elected on a program that included a large increase in health spending as a response to Tory “neglect.”

Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, poured money into the NHS. They also attempted some desultory and ineffective reforms. But they were up against the political reality that the NHS inevitably produces long waiting times for operations and the withholding of expensive drugs ? and that these failings are equally inevitably blamed on the government.

Ten years later, spending on the NHS has doubled in real terms. An ambitious program of “targets” ? e.g., reductions in waiting times for operations ? has been launched. Such targets are a formal acknowledgment of rationing and poor-quality service, but are also frequently not met. Patients are kept waiting for many months for outpatient appointments and in-hospital treatment and, in some cases, denied life-saving drugs on the grounds of expense. It is the Labour government that is now blamed for these failings, the Tories who preach their fidelity to the ideal of socialized medicine, and the NHS that soars, fuelled by its own inherent shortcomings.

Perhaps politicians interested in keeping their jobs and preserving their power will recognize the cautionary tale.