The blessed NHS

This is a snippet from an old James Bartholomew article I just came across:

Incidentally, all sorts of American hospitals - especially the not-for-profit ones - receive large sums of cash from charitable benefactors. And if you think all the above is confusing, that is hardly even the beginning of the bewildering diversity and contradictions of American healthcare. It is a muddle.

Actually, the British system was a muddle, too, until Aneurin Bevan came along in 1945. As Secretary of State for Health he set about un-muddling it. We, too, used to have local government ("municipal") hospitals like America until he took them over. He took over the charitable hospitals too - like St Mary's and Moorfield's and many other famous ones. He made it not confusing at all. What could be simpler than the central government being in charge of everything? Over time, the government put itself in charge of all the doctors, too. So all was made simple and clear.

But the curious thing is, the new, improved, simple state system of Britain does not work as well as the American muddle. You have a better chance of living to see another day in the American, mish-mash non-system with its sweet pills of charity, its dose of municipal care and large injection of rampant capitalist supply (even despite the blanket of over-regulation) than in the British system where the state does everything. It is not that America is good at running healthcare. It is just that British state-run healthcare is so amazingly, achingly, miserably and mortally incompetent.