Socialized Medicine Is Tanking Britain’s Economy

Great Britain has a new king, a new prime minister—and a new economic crisis.

S&P Global says that the country is already in a recession. Inflation is at 9.9%, higher than in the United States. The pound has fallen dramatically against the U.S. dollar, and government debt is surging.

But at least the Brits can count on their 74-year-old system of socialized medicine, the National Health Service, right? Not really.

The NHS is facing a cost and care crisis of its own. And it may get worse, as the government contemplates spending cuts to bring inflation to heel and offset energy subsidies planned for winter.

Thanks to what one official has called “the greatest workforce crisis in history”—a massive shortage of doctors and nurses—the NHS now has a 6.8 million-patient backlog. Desperate patients are doing the only thing they can to get treatment: buying it on the private market.

Private health insurance is legal in the United Kingdom. Roughly 11% of Britons have private coverage. And it’s not solely the province of the rich. Last year, both the poorest and richest 10% of Britons allocated roughly the same percentage of their weekly expenditures to private medical care—even though their government was, ostensibly, providing it for free.

Waits for publicly provisioned care are catastrophic. Roughly one-third of British patients on waiting lists for potentially life-saving cardiac care have been queueing for more than four months. That’s about 95,000 people.

Only 61% of NHS patients start treatment within 18 weeks of referral. More than 377,000 British patients have been waiting over a year for treatment. More than 2,800 have been waiting over two years.

The stories of what patients and their families have to endure are heart-breaking. In August, a man died in the back of an ambulance in Norwich after waiting six hours to be admitted to a hospital. The medical staff couldn’t find him a bed.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. According to research from the Kings Fund, a British think tank, the number of NHS hospital beds in England has declined by more than half over the past 30 years, even as the number of patients has increased significantly.

No wonder public satisfaction with Britain’s government-run system is at its lowest since 1997—just 36%, according to a recent poll. Yet an overwhelming majority of Britons still supports keeping medicine “free at the point of delivery,” even if that delivery is perpetually delayed.

And “free” is a relative term. The cost of the NHS to taxpayers has been surging. Ten years ago, spending for the Department of Health and Social Care—most of which goes to the NHS—was about 125 billion pounds. This year, it topped 190 billion pounds—a 52% increase.

According to data from the World Bank, more than 17% of Britain’s healthcare expenditures are out of pocket. In the United States, by contrast, out-of-pocket expenditures account for just 11% of overall health expenditures.

The National Health Service has long been a model for fans of socialized medicine worldwide. But it’s falling apart. Whether they intend to or not, Britons turning to the private market for care are signaling that their healthcare system would benefit from a shot of American-style free enterprise.

And the experience of our peers across the pond shows that the United States should promote choice and competition in our own healthcare system—not move to a single-payer system where government is the sole insurance provider.