Note the guns fired into East Berlin, against those leaving, the mines were before you got to the fence from the eastern side. You can tell socialism from the way the guns are pointing.
Research by the respected economist Philip McCann has found – astonishingly – that the inequalities between our regions are now wider and deeper than in any other major advanced economy worldwide. In recent weeks McCann produced new evidence confirming that…(…)…Half the population today lives in areas in which access to healthcare, he says, is of a quality no better than in eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe is still trying to recover from the ravages of a Stalinist economy. The National Health Service is a Stalinist economy.
And?
Well, I suppose the and is when do we free ourselves from the NHS and try to clamber back to where we should be, just as Eastern, now Central, Europe is doing.
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I'm never moved by comparisons of how my country or region compares to some other one. The key question is: Is health care any good? If Poland has an idea to make it better, steal it! Privatization? Yes, that works! But if the goal is simply to achieve a higher number, you get gimmicky manage-by-the-numbers solutions, and in the US, open yourself up to poisoning of the numbers (Covid "cases") to let your leaders do what they wanted to do beforehand.
The WHO rank UK healthcare as 18th worldwide, however, the highest ranked Eastern European country is the Czech Republic at 48. So whilst UK healthcare isn't very good, it still is much better than in all of Eastern Europe, Estonia is ranked 77th and Romania 99th.
The WHO rankings are very heavy on equality. Essentially, tax financing. Insurance based systems, however good the healthcare, will do badly on WHO comparisons.
The UK is ranked 18th by the WHO and France in first place, despite the fact that both countries have universal systems financed by tax; the disparity is no doubt because at least the WHO weight health outcomes and responsiveness significantly in their criteria. If the UK is only 18th despite its free at the point of delivery system, that implies that clinical outcomes are far worse than 18th would suggest.
The leftists at The Commonwealth Fund are it seems not much interested in quality at all, ranking the UK in first place "Overall", one supposes that they think it meritorious that child oncology treatment is equally poor in the UK across the entire NHS.
Strangely they also rank France and Sweden significantly worse than the UK in their Overall category, yet the UK is ranked almost on a par with the USA when it comes to Health Outcomes and much worse than any other comparable European country, including France and Sweden.
The Commonwealth Fund unintentionally elucidate the truism that equality has no inherent value, this being especially true when it comes to healthcare.
Almost any ranking by the UN, WHO, etc. is suspect. If you dig into how they came up with the ratings there are usually some absurdities. For one thing, if everyone gets crappy healthcare you score higher on equality than if 80% get excellent, 15% get good and 5% get poor.
Yes, and any ranking/grading/marks by any organization has some assumptions built in, which are hard to discern in the study, and not included at all in the newspapers that lap up the press release. However, if gov't employees are involved in the study, having a lot of gov't is always a plus. You can't say we're doing anything good, but the study proves we care about patients. Q.E.D.