In 1948 the United Kingdom sent a leaflet to every home in the country stating that the newly created National Health Service would provide everyone with “all medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone – rich or poor, man, woman or child – can use it or any part of it.” Today’s NHS, however, has created a far different reality.

“We are seeing a healthcare system that is rationing people’s care by waiting lists, that is relying on people dying on waiting lists so that they don’t have to have their care funded,” said Helen Evans, President of Nurses for Reform, a pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-led reform of British, European and other healthcare systems around the world. “We have a government who are allegedly trying to work down our waiting lists and they think it is good that somebody will be seen within 18 weeks of referral to a specialist.”

Rationing care is the only way that nationalized health systems like the NHS can keep the growth of costs at a manageable rate. Heritage’s Ted Bromund:

A centralized system incentivizes people to be more concerned with managing the system than with managing their jobs. And when their job is making life and death decisions, that’s a recipe not just for failure, or even for expensive failure. It’s a recipe for inhumanity.