[dx034]

The healthcare is that good in many European countries. Netherlands, Norway, France, UK (NHS has an awful reputation but is actually quite good) are just some examples. It's rather rare to find a European country with expensive or inadequate healthcare.

[DanBC]

The UK's NHS is in a bad situation because it's been underfunded for many years by all parties.

A lot of the current pressure is a combination of that chronic underfunding and the chronic underfunding of social care. We don't need more beds, we need better social care to allow us to use the beds we have more efficiently. (Except we do need more beds. In the last six years there's been a reduction of 1 in 16 acute beds and 1 in 5 MH beds).

It's a weird situation because UK gov spends less per capita on health care than the US gov. If we increased spending on certain things - social care; early intervention MH services; better drug and alcohol services - we'd save so much money.