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thu2111

primarily due to cuts to services from the incumbent government

There have been no such cuts. This is a frequently made claim but it isn't true.

Here's a graph of the budget of the Department of Health:

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/BA1A/production/...

As you can see it only ever goes up. This is in "real terms" i.e. with inflation taken into account.

Usually activists who make this claim and are put under a bit of questioning pressure will admit that by "cut" they mean the budget was increased less fast than they believe necessary, which isn't the same thing.

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There have been cuts to services. That is not the same as claiming there have been cuts to funding.

What is true is that the NHS has been severely underfunded (if they want to continue to provide the same services) and that services have been cut as a result. https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/

Unless you think the NHS are burning the extra money, there are more services offered than before.

It may feel like there's less, because there's more people now, so the increase in services is offset by the increase in population. But that's also not a cut.

There's a fundamental design issue with any system that combines free healthcare with free movement. Neither party is interested in changing this situation, but Labour don't even pretend to try - they have adopted policies at their conference of essentially eliminating all immigration controls. It's hard to imagine what kind of budget a nationalised health service would require given no constraints on served population. Effectively it requires an infinite budget.

Not really, free movement has lead to more tax take to be spent on the health care system.

Health spending in every country has increased per capita (inflation adjusted), in the UK it has too. But in the UK, for 40 years, been way under that of countries like France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and of course the U.S. The rate of increase hasn't increased either.

This isn't an issue of (typically working age) immigration - indeed that offsets the problem. It's an issue of an increasingly older population costing more per head. In the UK there's also an issue that people stay in hospital too long because of a failure in social care.

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