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>why are people going into hospital without having a Covid test first (assuming non emergency)

The truth is that once you put aside the creepy fawning nationalism around the NHS it's actually got some serious systemic issues that never get properly resolved because it's a political football. It's not "joined up" very well at all, at least in my experience paperwork cockups are pretty much universal. The clinical staff are fantastic for the most part but the way it's administered and organised is almost comically dysfunctional. It's damn-near impossible to actually pin down an NHS service to a concrete date or time to get anything done in my experience, in some cases you just get ignored unless you specifically know that you have to chase them up yourself. I ended up going private at my own expense and the conspiracy theorist in me reckons that's probably the ultimate aim: let the service rot to the point anyone who can afford it will jump ship for the private sector.

I have a lot of respect for the people on the ground at the NHS, lions led by donkeys indeed.

3 comments

> comically dysfunctional

intentionally dysfunctional.. there has been a multi-decade effort to prep the NHS essentially for complete privatization

You mean the multiple decades that included a left wing Labour government, the same party that set up the NHS? A post-2008 crash spending freeze from which the NHS was exempt? The decades of huge budget increases?

The NHS is not intentionally dysfunctional any more than the USSR was. It's dysfunctional because the state cannot run large, complex operations regardless of how hard it tries. It's because the NHS is a top down command and control economy and those have never worked, in any period of history. It's because without competition the inevitable result is decay and steadily advancing institutional incompetence (paired with financial incontinence). That's why successful countries have economies based on free competition and why even China had to adopt it via Deng Xioping's reforms in the 1980s.

The NHS is an embarrassment to the UK and I say that as a British citizen. No other country has ever sought to emulate it because it is bad. The quasi-religious fervor with which it's viewed by the left occurs because it's an obsolete institution that nobody in their right mind would ever even consider proposing in the modern era, and they know it. If the NHS and BBC go then there would be no more socialist institutions beyond, perhaps, universities.

> let the service rot to the point anyone who can afford it will jump ship for the private sector

I think that's pretty far-fetched and can't see a good reason for this purposefully being the case. It's just Hanlon's razor, really.

A former health secretary (Jeremy Hunt) co-authored a book that laid out this exact strategy.

There's enough private healthcare interests with links to the Conservative Party to at least make it worth raising an eyebrow in my opinion. I'm not making any specific allegations but it wouldn't be the first time Conservative Party ministers got in bed with private interests, the PPE scandal of last year comes to mind for example.

You're right of course though, passive incompetence is probably more likely than active malice.

> passive incompetence is probably more likely than active malice.

Well this is pretty much the norm at most levels of government around the world. There are no real performance indicators being used to judge accomplishments or effectiveness for most government jobs.

Keep in mind: efficient and organized or not, the government check keeps coming.

What are the incentives to improve then?