At least the Tories got them out of the EU. That's huge. They need to take the next step. Reform the welfare state of the UK. They worship the NHS. They need to allow private competition so that the NHS is not the only game in town. But yeah, that's their problem. We have our own $#it to worry about.
The NHS is totally on its knees at the moment, but it is not a big state monolith in the way it’s caricatured in the USA.
Internal market competition was introduced in the 90s, and there’s already a healthy private sector (almost all General Practice, dentists and opticians are private).
The problems are really with the hospital networks where if anything too much is being done by private contractors and freelancers - projects that could’ve been done inhouse in a year or two with the right resources are providing revolving doors for consultants on fixed term contracts who have absolutely no incentive to deliver. Their contracts end, new consultants take over, and start from scratch.
It’s currently being broken up into groups where “integrated care services” (mostly provided by the private sector) will take over. Maybe that’ll help.
The UK is too small for a USA approach to work - there’s no way England could adopt the American model without sending the cost of treatment through the roof, far out of range for most people to afford. (some states in the USA have the same issue - USA needs to de-risk across state borders to solve that; if you encouraged much larger insurance players to operate across all fifty states, y’all would see the cost of healthcare plummet. People might not like that - America has its sacred cows too, it’s not just us.)
There has always been private competition. That's been the case since the foundation of the NHS in 1949. In order to secure the cooperation of the medical profession, Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister responsible, ensured that the legislation guaranteed the right of doctors to work in private practice, as well as the NHS, if they so chose. That's been the case ever since.
For the first 35 years of the NHS, the private health sector was small, serving niche markets. It was only when structural problems in the NHS started to appear from the mid 1980s that the private insurance industry began to take off, and is now flourishing. Most hospital consultants and other senior doctors work in both sectors.