Is it time to privatise the ever failing NHS...

Lefties always look at spending and warble about the NHS being top of the tree according to various lefty organisations and that it's available to  all , free, at the point of need
Not one of them looks at the only really important factor
''Is it any good at curing the patient?''
No-one looks at the poor outcomes of the NHS that place it towards the bottom of any successful outcomes league

Proof please.

You mean if we only caught up with the spend in comparable countries.

I expect you to distort realities, that is your approach, I suggest you read the Edited follow ups. 

I asked for the proof. Not proof that you are wrong, but thanks anyway.

No your information did do the job, it proved you were wrong.

You claimed that 'all five countries were doing better than the UK, that was not entirely correct. And regardless of that the UK was one of the lowest spenders on health of the top 14 countries which was the main point of my post.

The NHS has been an ideological football on both left and right, and in consequence has been repeatedly reorganised to death by successive governments, with reforms informed more by ideological assumptions rather than pragmatism. The right automatically assumes that any increase in marketisation and private sector involvement will automatically make things better and cost less. The left automatically assumes it will make things worse and cost more and that the way to make things work better is to bring as much in house as possible to remove the private sector as much as possible.

Both standpoints are at heart driven by ideology rather than pragmatism, one side taking for granted that private is good and public bad, whilst the other takes the exact opposite for granted. Most of us, including me, have tended to do this.

I think we all need to move away from ideological assumptions of this kind and figure out exactly what we want from our NHS which for most of us is surely a health service that is free at the point of use, where public health and saving lives and making injured or sick people better is the primary aim, and we want this to be done effectively and within a reasonable time frame, as cost effectively as possible.

We need to determine what exactly is wrong with the NHS and it is likely to be many things, and how to fix them and what resources are likely to be necessary and how this is to be paid for. And the fixing that needs to be done to have any hope of working needs to be free of ideological assumptions that private is always better or private is always worse.

We also need to carry public support for any necessary reforms, which means we need to take account of what the public will accept and what it won't. Public opinion for example is largely opposed to any compulsory insurance based funding model, familiar as we all are with the tendency of insurers to seek to avoid paying out by resorting to dodgy clauses in the small print. And we would all be just one progressive condition diagnosis away from insurance costs going through the roof.

What works and what the public wants from it is more important than using it as a testing ground for public versus private ideological experiments.