Is the NHS the UK’s biggest problem?

From Marginal Revolution.

"UK ambulances took an average of 1 hour & 32 minutes to respond to heart attacks & strokes last month. 5 X higher than target, double the average in November. Feels like the NHS is falling apart

That is from Matt Goodwin.

Some Ukrainian refugees in the UK are returning back home to get medical care, because their pledge of NHS coverage has turned out to be very meaningful.

I think one has to face the possibility that the NHS has fallen apart, and “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men…” etc.  To make it all much worse, the British citizenry is convinced that it can get a great product for nearly free.  How will the news be broken to voters?

I don’t see much coverage of this in the MSM, but here is Bloomberg reporting on Peter Thiel:

[Thiel] has described British people’s affection for the state-backed health service as “Stockholm syndrome.”

The venture capitalist’s comments came during a Q&A session after a speech at the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society, on Monday. He also said that the crisis-stricken health service, currently grappling with strikes and long wait times for emergency care, was making people sick and needs “market mechanisms” to fix it. Such mechanisms include privatizing parts of it, avoiding rationing and loosening regulations…

“In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” Thiel said after an address in which he argued that a perceived fear of disruption was holding back technological and scientific developments. “In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards-compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.”

The first step to fixing the NHS was, he said, to break away from the view that it is “the most wonderful thing in the world” and understand it as an “iatrogenic” institution, which means it makes people sick.

Ouch.  What will it cost to recapitalize the thing?  How long will it take?  I am more optimistic about England than most commentators these days, but this is perhaps problem number one?

To be clear, I nonetheless recognize the recent successes of the NHS in collecting data and testing hypotheses.  It is patient care at the retail level that is the problem."