> the cynical would say purposefully

Underfund public services, complain that they are bad and move them to more expensive private companies is a well known tactic to increase private profits a the cost of citizens well-being. It is tried over Europe by parties in more or less the same form.

There are many studies that demonstrated how, for example, health care is way more expensive in private hands. If that is incompetence or malice I will go for the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

It is extremely damning that someone that suffers a traumatic experience like is rape is thrown into a for-profit system which goal is maximizing profit.

It's barbaric and completely unacceptable in my view. Shameful.

> NHS is due to Tory mismanagement (the cynical would say purposefully)

They aren't mismanaging it. They are 'strangling it' in order to be able to 'save it' later. If you did not hear that phrase before, its privatization. That's how it is done anywhere. If you people don't stop it, you will end up seeing the entirety of it being sold.

The same thing happened to the tube system in the UK, no?

I believe they outright sold it wholesale because it wasnt that sensitive like NHS. If they could, they would do the same. But since the UK public seem to be very sensitive about NHS, they seem to be doing it the slow way.

That is without the fact that if UKIP types ever got ahold of the government, they would sell NHS wholesale to US corporations in one single day without worrying about the public opinion.

I don’t this particular topic is the one on which to make that point:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-violence-against-wo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/world/europe/britain-rape...

Same goes for France and Spain, as far as I can tell.

As someone that has lived in both the UK and France, I have to say the French medical service is several levels above the UK NHS.

Even during the pandemic I had excellent care. Compared to a friend of mine that had gallstones and was in terrible pain and was told the wait would be a year. He ended up paying to go private as he was in such pain. Had his gall bladder removed.

I had a few health issues myself over the past two years. I never had an issue getting a same day doctors appointment, never had to wait more than 5 days for a scan (MRIs) and no more than two weeks for a procedure (gastroscopy under GA).

Really opened my eyes to how bad things are with the NHS right now :(

Of course the French system is not perfect, claiming so would be stupid. But when all of my friends and family back in the UK complain about getting GP appointments or month long waits for scans I can't help but think they're doing something very wrong when France has a similar population size, GDP, etc. and my experience has never been anywhere near as difficult or slow as in the UK.

Even before the pandemic getting an appointment with my doctor in the UK was a pain. So much so I had sort of conditioned myself into avoiding do so unless it was something important so I avoided it the same in France when I first moved here. But seeing how functional the system is it really changed my attitude towards visiting my doctor. I am far more proactive now getting anything that hangs around more than a week checked out without question.

And the Nordic countries and probably many more European countries.

But there are always pressure to reduce public "costs" to reduce taxes. That European health care is better for the average person is not a given, it is something that Europeans need to keep pressuring to not lose.

I have seen degrading healthcare in Spain, for example, as banks received millions of Euros during the housing crisis money for hospitals shrunk. But when things got better it takes a lot of fighting to just get some money back into public services.

Part of what makes Europe such an amazing place to live is good public health care. It improves all well being metrics.

> But there are always pressure to reduce public "costs" to reduce taxes.

You are right for some definition of this; but in Sweden people are very happy to pay tax even if it's a lot, because they see themselves as getting a lot back for it.

That's not true when everything is mismanaged and underfunded though; which is the current case. Healthcare is in the grips of private hands for other reasons in Sweden, and that's that the healthcare system doesn't pay well for directly employed doctors- this leads to everyone working for the private health services and since there is a dearth of doctors working for the government: they must hire these companies.

Nothing you couldn't fix:

Every time the private interests increase their pressure to privatize things, vote for a more left-wing party in proportion to the pressure that the private lobbies are putting on the government. If they go full postal Ayn Rand, you go full communist in voting.

As historically verified by the experience of many countries, nothing less than this fixes that problem. If they pull the rope one inch, you pull it two inches.

> In trouble as the NHS is due to Tory mismanagement (the cynical would say purposefully

It's not cynical, it's just good business. If you're a private corporation wanting to get into some market, you're going for pressure politicians to kill off the government competitor so you can take over. This is how it works in countries all over the world, under pressure to privatize government services. Many governments, such as the US, fail at withstanding that pressure. And so we have awful stories like this.