‘The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion,’ Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson famously once observed. However, given the swivel-eyed fanaticism with which its supporters will defend it, even from the overwhelming evidence of its shortcomings, at this point it might be more accurate to describe the NHS as Britain’s national cult.
The utterly unparalleled degree of moral outrage which greets any criticism of the NHS bespeaks the decades of propaganda – in the state’s schools, from the state’s politicians, and on the state’s news and media outlets – which have taught the British people to believe that the only alternative to a state-controlled healthcare monopoly is for the poor to die in the streets. So pervasive has this myth become that the Labour party has been able to base its entire electoral strategy, for decades, on painting themselves as the only party that truly cares about ‘our NHS’, and a recent survey found that, when asked ‘What makes you proud to be British’, the NHS was the nation’s most common answer by a considerable margin. All this has led to a situation wherein the desperately needed reforms to Britain’s healthcare system cannot even be discussed, due to the irrational overflowing of blind rage and uncomprehending contempt that greets any criticism of Britain’s ultimate sacred cow.
This baseless self-satisfaction and refusal to consider change is in no way helped by studies such as one which has recently made headlines across the British press, which placed the NHS as ‘the number one health system’. The study in question ranked the healthcare systems of 11 countries, and found that Britain’s NHS fulfilled the study’s criteria of success most adequately, followed by Australia and the Netherlands, with Canada, France, and the United States languishing at the bottom of its rankings. This positive result might come as a surprise even to those who usually accept the mainstream narrative surrounding the NHS. Indeed, even at the bottom of the BBC’s own triumphalist article on the study in question, they link to related stories with headlines such as ‘NHS rationing leaves patients in pain’, and ‘Long waits for surgery have tripled in four years’!
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on July 21, 2017.
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