As Margaret Thatcher asked when she assumed the Prime Ministership, “What is that we are doing with 566,000 that we can’t do with 500,000?”
(And even she couldn’t get rid of the NHS.)
The NHS was installed after the British people had been regimented for war for more than six years. Hard to realize how hard life was for them in 1946-47. Indeed, they were suffering more than the German people who had just “lost” the war, except that they still had their “own”government. Even Thatcher could not break their dependency on the State, and she was in the end rejected even by her own party.