It's also worth mentioning that private health care and insurance both exist in the UK.
Individuals still get the choice to go to any private doctor they want, they'll just have to pay for it themselves. Just like the US, except the NHS provides an excellent safety net for everyone without private insurance or the means to pay for private care.
And in some cases it involves NHS facilities too. There are definitely some questionable aspects of our public/private healthcare. But again, this isn't always how it works, and the ethics involved are also complicated.
I know someone whose condition rapidly deteriorated while receiving treatment in a private hospital and when things were looking really bad they got transferred to an NHS hospital.
I hope the person you know was OK. That transfer is actually not surprising. Emergency/intensive care is almost always NHS here.
Private options tend to be better in situations like having multiple treatments available where one is significantly more effective or more reliable but also costs a lot more. Sometimes the NHS will only offer a cheaper but inferior alternative, which sounds horrible until you think that there is a huge but ultimately pooled budget and any time policy allows more spending on one treatment there is always someone losing out somewhere else.
Agreed on both points. The UK system is far from perfect but for balance we should also say that it is not normal or expected for something as bad as that to happen here. Even in recent times, with the extra pressures of COVID, critical care has mostly kept up and the emergency overflow facilities that were built very quickly in case of overwhelming demand mostly went unused.
Obviously there will always be limits and the available resources will run out if one of them is reached. In the aftermath of a major incident or an unusually busy period it can happen. I expect a lot of us from the UK might agree that the limits need to be raised further by investing more into the NHS. But I would still choose this type of system over a US-style one every time. I've never heard of anyone here dying because they couldn't afford tens of thousands for routine medication to treat a common condition.
Individuals still get the choice to go to any private doctor they want, they'll just have to pay for it themselves. Just like the US, except the NHS provides an excellent safety net for everyone without private insurance or the means to pay for private care.