Are you proud of the NHS? I’m not

Roast beef. The Lake District. Proper pubs. I can see why, in a recent survey, these were among the 50 things that made Brits proud to be British. But the NHS at No. 1? That I do not understand, says Kristian Niemietz. One takes pride in the exceptional, yet there’s nothing exceptional in a health system free at the point of use: every system in the developed world bar America’s has that. Those other systems, though, can take pride in exceptional outcomes: the Swiss one “has the lowest rate of (healthcare-related) avoidable deaths” in Europe; the Dutch, exceptionally fast access to treatment; the Japanese, excellent survival rates for cancer. France’s system is consistently good across the board. By contrast, the NHS is usually in the bottom third of league tables, often “on a par” with Slovenia: it’s a system that “gave us Mid Staffordshire” and that now has another trust being investigated for its unusually high number of infant deaths. So why the pride? Unappealing as the jingoism of Little Englanders may be, “it’s not nearly as cringeworthy as the NHS patriotism of the Left”.