Coming hot on the heels of the millions waiting for their turn in the NHS, there is an eventual rise of private healthcare in the UK:
NHS backlog drives steep rise in self-pay healthcare | Financial Times
Demand for private healthcare is soaring in the UK even while a sharp increase in living costs hits customers’ pockets, as patients despair of record NHS waiting lists, data show.
Self-pay admissions — where people choose to fund their own healthcare rather than use private health insurance — rose 39 per cent across the UK in the two years to the end of 2021, according to the independent Private Healthcare Information Network, an organisation that tracks treatment data.
Here’s another interesting nugget:
The preference for private healthcare is coming from a broader income distribution than in the past, Hare noted. Even among households earning less than £40,000 a year the number willing to fund their own procedures has risen by 54 per cent, or 1.7mn people, compared with two years earlier, according to Spire’s analysis.
It is difficult to rely on the “optimistic projections” pushed out by industry sources, but it is a marker of edge case scenarios where the socialist means of healthcare delivery are being phased out. NHS won’t collapse as it falls under “too big to fail scenario”, but it is evident that it was never meant to scale up. It will gradually turn into a political hot potato, requiring an increasingly larger share of budgetary support till it becomes untenable.
RadOncNotes 