State of the NHS

you're all moaning about it and I'm sure there is waste and incompetance like there is in all large organisations. but what is the alternative?
The American system where the rich get brilliant care and the poor die from lack of insurance? and where millions upon millions are spent on administering a fantastically complex private insurance system?
Or the European system where you might have to pay even more tax.
We still get health care on the cheap and every time I have had to get involved with it I got fixed up for free and by fantastic people who really did care.

I agree about the IT system, like all big government programmes it will suck (just wait for the ID card system you aint seen nothing yet) but it is so easy to stick the knife into the NHS and so hard to make a better system without paying more money. we might have doubled spending but we still don't spend as much as other wealthy countries.
It's not true that there is some cheap good quality healthcare system out there and we are too stupid to get it. Every system has problems. The French and Germans moan about the cost of their systems the Americans have been desperate to reform theirs for years and half the world has no health care at all.
Modern medicine costs money and if you are injured or infected with something life threatening then there is no limit to what you would be prepared to pay to get it fixed.

What we pay for the NHS is roughly half of what we spend on booze and fags in a year.

I'm glad we doubled what we spend on the NHS.

This IT system could be so good in principle. Honestly, you should say the state of handwritten records, they're mostly an illegible joke (when they can be found).

There's so much potential for this to be a world leading IT project, but the scepticism is massive.

The only good thing about it is that contractors aren't paid until they deliver, and as they've so far delivered fuck all they've got fuck all. Unfortunately this means that they're just going to abandon it when they take a massive financial hit on it 2nd year running.