The best part of Britain's health care

This is a slightly strange thing for the Guardian to be trumpeting:

The UK is the best place in the world in which to die, according to a study comparing end-of-life care in 80 countries.

The integration of palliative care into the NHS, a strong hospice movement largely funded by the charitable sector, specialised staff and deep community engagement are among the reasons cited by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Not that most of us tend to like thinking about it but yes, death is an inevitable part of any health care system. And here we've got an analysis of the one part of health care where Britain really is the world leader. Which is very interesting, of course it is, to know that we are still, at times, world beaters.

But what's even more interesting is that this one world beating part of the overall health care service is the one part of it not run by the NHS and not financed through taxation: that hospice movement. Which is rather food for thought about how we might look to organise, run and finance other parts of that health care system, isn't it?

Perhaps, even, the original decision to amalgamate all of the private, charitable, municipal health care systems into that tax funded NHS wasn't the quite the right thing to have done even?