I have a very different opinion. I believe that, like many other aspects of life and culture, our response to Covid ripped open any cracks and accelerated ongoing problems. I think we are currently seeing an accelerated and terminal decline of fully-public healthcare in the UK.
It's hard to call it "saved", when people going into cardiac arrest are literally dying waiting hours for ambulances, and routine care is largely unavailable.
I'm not saying I don't believe you, I want to take everyone at their word... the problem is it seems like you can talk to different people and the experience is like night and day.
You're not the first person to bring up that their healthcare is awful, I see it often. I also see people saying its the best thing since sliced bread since its free and how thankful they are for it.
Its so hard to tell what is the truth because I could see both being true at the same time.
I try not to pry but personally, I do have a friend in Canada that their dad needs a life saving operation but just can't get one. I really don't know what that means. They say the appointment is too far out and it costs too much to get it done in the US or that they can't get approved or something. To me that just seems insane to the point where I must not be understanding correctly... but on the flip side, I see the same thing.
For instance, I had a European tell me they were thankful their general check up didn't cost $1k "like it does in the US" and for whatever reason they were adamant that a routine checkup costs $1k. It's just not true at all. I feel we all may just be extrapolating headlines lol.
Here's something to help you understand the state of Canadian healthcare: Right now, it is impossible—let me repeat, impossible—for people in Atlantic Canada (the easternmost four provinces) without a family doctor to get one. <https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/nova-scotia-still-struggling-to-...> The waitlist has been years long for years. This is not something occurring only in rural areas; this is true in big cities like Halifax.
I am hearing that the same is true in Vancouver.
That makes a lot of sense...
Not gonna take a political stance other than pointing out that conservatives are not known for bolstering social services.
Actually my only real political stance in general is that any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics. Tories have been in power for 12 years now, which is very unusual in general since discontent with current government tends to grow with how long they've been in office.
Indeed. I live in Wales, which has only ever been led by Welsh Labour. Since having our own devolved parliament in the late 90's, it's been Labour in charge.
As we've been talking about the state of healthcare, conditions here in Wales are much worse than the UK as a whole. This also happens to be true of practically every other form of governmental function.
The only thing that seems to actually work is switching between them often enough that you get mostly the initial improvement, with some regression that is corrected by switching sides, and then rinse and repeat. A lot this applies to things like taxes and financial regulation too, I've found.
The general idea is that representative democracy can be seen as a sort of evolutionary algorithm, evolving a set of laws and regulations.
Think of elections as your fitness test. Whatever things feed into the election results, like debates and media storms can be seen as selective pressures.
For a democracy to function you need a healthy multi-party system, healthy independent media, political parties with strong grassroots control internally, a reasonably educated populace, and minimal corruption. All of these make the total selective pressures more aligned with what's best for everyone. If one party gets power for too long, we're essentially overprioritising selective pressures from one subset of society, causing an effective power imbalance that starts to cause more and more problems.
I might blog about it since it's a bit complicated to explain years of private, abstract thought like this, but hopefully that was an interesting read anyway.