People do indeed question what doesn't seem to work Polly

Polly Toynbee is outraged - outraged - that people are questioning the Wonder of the World that is the National Health Service.

The clapping has died away, paper rainbows in windows curl at the edges, and the NHS is under siege. “Support for the NHS may soon start to crumble,” reports the Centre for Health Communication.

“Start to? It has,” says one seasoned hospital chief executive I check with regularly. Emails thump into his inbox daily from angry patients waiting for diagnostics and treatments: “They’re coming direct to me now.” As 50,500 people across England have been waiting over a year, he says, “my waiting times are horrible. Pre-Covid I had just four people waiting for a year, but now it’s over 1,200 – and we’re absolutely not the worst.”

Well, yes, quite, if the thing that swallows 10% of the entire nation in order to provide health care isn’t providing health care then there will be some questions asked. And rightly so we would think.

We can even provide some guidance as to what those questions should be. You know, things like whether a Stalinist bureaucracy is quite the way to be doing things. Even, did the NHS England, a slightly more outsourced and marketised service, perform better or worse than the less so NHS Wales and NHS Scotland?

In fact, we should be asking the one grand question - is the NHS the right way to be gaining health care? Given that the complaint is that it’s not delivering it at present that seems to be the important one.