A knee-jerk defence of the struggling NHS
Donald Trump is not making his long-delayed visit to the UK any easier. Last year he was denounced for retweeting an anti-muslim video from a far-right British organisation and he then pulled out of a planned trip to London to open the new US embassy. Nonetheless, at Davos, Theresa May – who had criticised that earlier tweet – reissued her invitation to the president to come to Britain later this year, only to be confounded once again by Mr Trump’s tweeting. In order to make a point about healthcare in America, he issued a message saying “thousands of people marching in the UK because their U (universal) system going broke and not working.” There has been outrage at the president’s apparent insult to the NHS, with ministers falling over themselves to say how much they love it. Mrs May said she was “proud” of it.
Only in Britain is it necessary to fetishise the way we deliver healthcare. In Nigel Lawson’s words, the NHS is the nearest thing we have to a national religion and woe betide anyone who criticises it, especially if he is a foreigner. To do so is a heresy even if it is true – especially if it is true.
The fact is the NHS is going broke, or at least it does not have enough money to function properly – something even most of the Cabinet seems to agree on. In many ways it is not working either, or not as well as it should. Thousands did march last week, principally to complain that the Government was not funding the NHS sufficiently. But so voracious is its appetite and so great expectations and demand that it is hard to know how much extra would ever be enough.
Instead of treating any criticism of the NHS as an assault on national amour propre, the country would be better served by politicians who stopped pretending it is the “envy of the world” and put in place a plan for its survival for another 70 years.
Mr Trump was wrong to single out the NHS as though it is a unique example of a universal health service. Many countries have them; and they are better than the American system, which leaves so many people out in the cold. But it would work so much better if we were prepared to adopt more systematically the best practices from around the world and even from within the NHS itself. In view of the problems it is facing, not least with elderly care, pretending that it is a word-beating system that should be immune from criticism is an act of wilful national denial.