Its pretty easy to find shortages and flaws in any system.
And yes, national health is always tempting for budget cuts because its a huge number, and trimming it 5% gives real returns.
Shortages of drugs and equipment are often tied to supply-chain issues more than budget, and again that's a barrel of worms best left for another thread.
Clearly single-payer can work, but it does need the single-payer to, well, pay.
Brexit is a large factor because the UK was a net-importer of aid from Europe. And Europe was the biggest trading partner. Predictably leaving has decreased the economy such that tax revenues are down, which in turn means less to spend on social services.
Then we can talk about freedom of movement, and the number of Europeans who staffed the NHS and who no longer do so, and cannot be replaced by other Europeans.
So sure, the global economy is taking strain at the moment. Brexit is not the only cause. But its a pretty big sucking chest wound.
Sure, every situation has its shortcomings, possibly even big sucking chest wounds which don't help.
But my point was that if multiple systems, some of which seem different (US vs EU), all with different apparent wounds, appear to fail in the same way at the same time, maybe there's something that's common among them which is the actual cause. Perhaps it's just a coincidence. But which is more likely?
France absolutely has staff and funding shortages, on top of the supply chain issues for medicine [0].
For the US, there sure is the affordability issue, but I don't think that's anything new. However, OP's point is that there had already been staff shortages for a while before COVID, but now the proverbial camel's back has been broken:
> Ultra lean staffing prior to covid led to the sh*tshow during the pandemic and, now that everyone is quitting, things are now in total collapse. [...] There are 30 rooms in the ER, but 3 nurses overnight…
This is the exact situation in France. The hospitals are physically still there, but there's not enough staff.
I don't get why the underlying problem is not even being discussed here at all. Any attempt to fix the system will have to increase investment in both training and drug research.
This will be a large investment (if doubling the training budget produced double the graduates that would not be enough), and will NOT bear fruit until those people actually graduate, which is 6 years minimum, and mostly 10 years away. So for 10 years, it means paying through taxes while getting minimum to no improvements in return. Furthermore, such a large increase is not possible at short notice, even if the money is available, so it will take more than 10 years time.
For research one might take profit margins of large pharma as an indicator: a fully nationalized, but equally capable, pharma research system would cost some 15% less, assuming nationalizing introduces zero inefficiencies. BUT that money would have to come from taxpayers directly through the government budget.
And nobody is looking for 15% reduction in drugs costs. That just won't move the needle enough. So in reality the government would have to increase the drug research budget to make drugs cheap.
Failing to do this will mean medicine becomes less accessible to people, regardless of whether we switch to a single payer system or not.
So let's get real here: we will fail to do this, and it will get worse.
And yes, national health is always tempting for budget cuts because its a huge number, and trimming it 5% gives real returns.
Shortages of drugs and equipment are often tied to supply-chain issues more than budget, and again that's a barrel of worms best left for another thread.
Clearly single-payer can work, but it does need the single-payer to, well, pay.
Brexit is a large factor because the UK was a net-importer of aid from Europe. And Europe was the biggest trading partner. Predictably leaving has decreased the economy such that tax revenues are down, which in turn means less to spend on social services.
Then we can talk about freedom of movement, and the number of Europeans who staffed the NHS and who no longer do so, and cannot be replaced by other Europeans.
So sure, the global economy is taking strain at the moment. Brexit is not the only cause. But its a pretty big sucking chest wound.