Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Donald Trump has got a point about the NHS

Donald Trump has found himself in the midst of another international spat, fuelled this time by his attack on the UK’s national religion. In an attempt to verbally jab the opposition in his own country, the President has managed to rile up many thousands, if not millions, of people who have deep reverence for Britain’s National Health Service:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/960486144818450432?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I’m rarely on the side of Trump’s Twitter provocations, but this one, I’ll admit, isn’t half bad. While Trump is wrong about the protestors’ motivations (giving the tweet ‘top troll’ status), he is right that they march in the wake of a ‘broke’ system. Only extreme ideological dedication to those three little letters could blind someone to this reality.

Despite increased funding for the system in real terms (albeit at a slowed rate of growth), the NHS is still breaking down in the most serious areas, including maternity wards and A&E. The NHS can’t even handle the winter flu without cancelling 50,000 operations in the first month of the year. The centralisation and lack of choice within healthcare provisions makes it ‘non-personal medical care’ almost by definition. And perhaps, most worryingly, the NHS has such an emotional hold on people that no one can criticise it without being accused of blasphemy.

Senior politicians are applauded for making ridiculous claims, such as that the system is the ‘envy of the world’, when in reality it ranks in the bottom third in international comparisons of health system performance.

As I walked through trickles of the ‘Save our NHS’ protest on Saturday in Parliament Square, I thought: who in their right mind could be outside Britain, looking in, and think this was a system worth emulating? Nobody in the developed world should envy the NHS. Not even the USA.

Trump’s quip has made its way into international headlines, as some of the UK’s heavy hitters pushed back on his comments.

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