Tim Knox

The NHS is failing us all

That conclusion is inescapable when you compare it to other health services around the world

While MPs compete to shout the loudest in their support of the UK’s health services (‘save our NHS!’), the British public has fallen out of love with it. More people are now dissatisfied with the NHS than are happy with it. This is true across all ages, income groups, sexes and voters of different political parties. Support for the NHS is now at the lowest level for a quarter of a century.

The public is right, the NHS is just not that good. Compare it, as I have done in a new report published today, with the health systems of 19 similarly well-off countries and it is hard to come to any other conclusion. UK life expectancy is down at 17 out of these 19 comparable nations. Our cancer survival rates are shockingly low. We are the worst for strokes and heart attacks. We are one from bottom for preventing treatable diseases. We are third from bottom for infant mortality. The only thing we top the charts on is helping diabetics avoid amputation. Sadly, despite the great efforts of NHS staff, our health system does not match the success rates of other nations: we come bottom of the league tables four times – more than any other country – and are in the bottom three for eight out of the 16 measures.

Every other economically advanced country – apart from America – provides universal care to everyone

Ah, the supporters of the NHS might say: you are just cherry-picking the countries you are comparing us with, or the diseases, or using dodgy data. Not so. The comparison countries and health outcomes were those used in a report co-published a few years ago by the three leading health think tanks, the Health Foundation, the Nuffield Trust and the King’s Fund, together with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. And all the numbers behind the health outcomes come from the extraordinarily detailed OECD health database.

So, with an unimpeachable methodology and a highly regarded database, another line of attack may be that somehow the only alternative is the American system.

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