People love to starve the beast then point to the starving beast and say "Look its dying, this was always going to happen".

>because the Tory governments have been squeezing NHS to death in terms of funding to try and privatize it?

No. Often repeated, never true. The NHS has had at or above inflation budget increases every year of Tory government[1]

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/166A5/production...

Look! Real terms money on the Y-axis, it only goes up!

"Squeezing in terms of funding", "Try and privatise it" are common myths repeated by the Labour party to get elected, and NHS bosses to increase the pie even further.

(1) It needs more than real terms increases because of a growing, ageing population.

(2) The government is destroying it in other ways, such as not having a proper recruitment pipeline, outsourcing the lucrative parts to the private sector, and failing to pay staff adequately (literally - nurses going to food banks).

The mean salary for an NHS nurse is £33k, if you need to go to a foodbank on that salary, you'll need to go to a foodbank on £36k or £40k.

Yes, there has been mismanagement with the recruitment pipeline, because every government prefers to pillage poorer nations for their healthcare staff since it's quicker than training them.

But remember, that's not the original claim is it - I didn't say the Conservatives are doing a perfect (or even good) job, I said they're not "squeezing it dry of funding" and not "trying to privatise it", which are both, still, false.

Also "outsourcing the lucrative parts" - give source for your claim please. They do cross subsidize, allowing private patients to pay for treatment in NHS hospitals, but that's not the same thing.

> £33k

That seems… incredibly low for a licensed profession

Bear in mind that that's apparently the mean salary, which one would expect to be somewhat higher than the median (as it's more affected by high salary outliers in upper bands).

The people in the NHS that I talk to say it's running on goodwill and sticking plasters right now.

Mean is meaningless. What's the minimum?

> Also "outsourcing the lucrative parts" - give source for your claim please.

This one indicates "unfunded mandates" - a trick the GOP in the US has done for decades (notably so-called Medicare Advantage which created a crisis that didn't exist): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/05/tories...

Another specific tactic is privatizing things that didn't need privatization (or the result is less efficient than what existed before, but it happened to make some corporations and ministers/secretaries a lot of money) - see "failed efficiency savings and privatization" here:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/nhs-crisis-rishi-sunak-cons...

Of course, Brexit (another Tory gift to their owners) really messed up things for NHS and caused a number of challenges (see above).

In the USA a big proportion of health care costs is hospital administrators. Also, the cost of administrating all the different private insurance plans. I wonder how much of the NHS budget is eaten up by administrators and how much that cost has increased with all privatization by stealth under the Tories?

The bulk of the budget should go to front line workers not administrators.