Your experience does not dictate the system, as doesn't mine.
There's a lot more to health than the health care system, and this doesn't say much about how painful the process can be, but the stats look pretty good for the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
I don't doubt that the NHS would treat me reasonably quickly and probably quite well if I had stage 2 cancer. People in the UK have been trained to herald such as a result as heroics from the NHS, as if the alternative was third-world level service. I do expect - based on a lifetime of anecdotal data from myself, friends and family - that the whole process would reveal repeated mistakes, bureaucracy and time and money wasted. False dichotomy often prevails in NHS discussions.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/health-and-social-care...
> The NHS Information Centre shows that there were about 43,000 NHS managers in 2009 (about 3.7 per cent of the total workforce), although this figure does not include many clinical managers. How does this compare to other sectors?
> According to the Office for National Statistics, the proportion of managers in the UK workforce as a whole in June 2010 was 15.4 per cent. These statistics also show that there were 77,000 hospital and health service managers across the United Kingdom, or 4.8 per cent of the NHS workforce. In other words, the NHS has a managerial workforce that is one-third the size of that across the economy as a whole.
Your letter taking a month to arrive is something that you can complain about. Did you make a complaint about it to the relevant trust?
Since we're detailing anecdata, I went on a working holiday to the US and had an accident in work. I was fully covered under my travel insurance, and doubly covered under my employer's insurance. I broke several bones in my hand and needed a costly operation to insert pins. The payment approval time from insurers took longer than the minimum wait for the operation before bones fused. I did not have the operation and have had problems in my right hand since.
I take your point about other European countries doing it better, I'm sure that's true. But the article is using the US system as a metric. I'm living in Ireland and would love to have a system as good as the NHS over here. Everything's relative but when you're comparing the NHS to clearly inferior systems there's not much point playing devil's advocate. There are enough individuals with a vested interest in the disassembly of the NHS as it is.
Why? Ireland has longer lifespans and better health-adjusted life expectancies than the UK.
Playing devil's advocate, I guess one could speculatively argue that Ireland's private system* brings up the overall average while the public system only caters to the poor and deprived, but I don't think this would be enough to bring the averages up on its own. I'm sure it's more likely lifestyle factors.
* for those unfamiliar, Ireland has a two-tier health system with extremely poor, underresouced single-payer free healthcare coupled with privately-run hospitals for those with the means to pay.
Sounds like the public system provides the majority of care.
Any "public" system still has a private-tier available to anyone that can afford a plane ticket.
Although, one thing to note is the the government does invest in private hospitals as well, so that 79% figure won't be exclusively public healthcare. This is due to public-private-partnerships whereby a single site will accommodate both a public and private hospital with the entire project being funded by a combination of public and private funds, usually with an extremely favourable arrangement for the private side.
If we are going by anecdotal evidence, the NHS has been absolutely brilliant for me.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jul/14/nhs-holds-on...
Personally, I've seen these reports come up from time to time, and having experienced some of the other countries listed find it very hard to believe. It sounds like a lot of the data is collected from patient surveys. My claim that citizens have a positive-skewed view of the system is relevant (I recently read a survey result where UK citizens considered the NHS a greater achievement than defeating the Nazis and the abolition of slavery).
I have not dealt with US healthcare but having experienced other countries' I'd strongly suggest not following the UK system - other European countries certainly come to mind as working substantially better. Of course, there's a huge "Save Our NHS" push due to the number of people it employs, unions, misplaced national pride etc.