It's not a system doing it. Healthcare professionals are choosing to work for private companies instead of the NHS. If you would like to ban that, then say so, but don't pretend there's an amorphous system to blame.
Some of that demand has money, therefore the private system will take capacity away from the NHS to supply the money. Of course it will.
That is jumping the queue.
Therefore as a society we have to ask whether we want to uphold the NHS's founding aim: "Healthcare free at the point of delivery based upon need not ability to pay".
We can't fix the supply shortage by taxing the rich. But we can stop the queue jumping by constraining who private healthcare is permitted to treat and in what order.
For the record I don't like the Fast Track queues at Alton Towers either. That's not the British way. In Britain we stand in line - whether Lord or Leper.
We make people pay for them. Like we do with every other resource on the planet.
Healthcare is something which should be accessible for all, and we can of course subsidise the less well off. But it still ultimately needs paying for.
We also have a hugely archaic system in the Royal Colleges. In no other profession do we expect people to sit regularly very expensive professional exams, and expect the staff to fund them out of their own salary rather than them being funded by their employer. £600 a go is not unheard of.
We do. And you know why. Because the NHS has no more capacity to train any more than that. In fact this last year it has struggled to do that because it was more interested in ensuring its staff had masks on properly than getting the job done. First year medical student placements in hospitals were the first to get the chop.
To train more people in any system, that system has to do less of what it is currently doing and more training. We can't afford that in the NHS, which is already struggling to meet demand.
Ultimately the problem is that we spent the seed cord in the 1990s, and we're struggling to replace it.
In this instance, the resources are humans, and it seems you want to force humans to do something they don't want to do. If you want slave-doctors just say so. It worked for the Romans I guess.
The exact argument is "doctors/nurses are limited, and they aren't behaving how I think they should behave. Let's fix the system so they have no choice". I guess that isn't slavery, that is just funneling people into a single path which they clearly don't like, because they reject that path when they have literally more than one option open to them.
And yet it is the private system in the UK that is taking away scarce supply from the NHS making it more vulnerable.
There is a supply side limit on doctors and nurses, which means private healthcare works like the Fast Track queue at Alton Towers. All it does is allow people with money to jump the queue at the expense of everybody else.
And remember that since the inception of the NHS Primary Care, ie the GPs, have always been private businesses. Yet that is the bit that is completely on its knees at the moment.
This isn't a private vs public argument. It's far more fundamental than that. It how do we share out increasingly scarce resources in a country that is getting poorer.