UK’s National Health Service Going Broke, British Docs Say It’s Worse Than Communist China

(CNSNews.com) -- As the U.S. government takes its first faltering steps to implement Obamacare, doctors in Britain are complaining that their country’s £5.6 billion publicly funded National Health Service (NHS) is “worse than Communist China.”

Physicians attending the British Medical Association’s annual conference in Edinburgh said they were fed-up with NHS bureaucrats overriding their medical decisions, “bullying” doctors, and putting money concerns before patient care, according to a June 25 story in the UK Telegraph.

“Not even in Communist China did they have managers overruling doctors in the operation of hospitals and health services,” Dr. Peter Holden, a member of the BMA, is quoted as saying.

But even though British physicians say that NHS bureaucrats are compromising patient care to save money, the government-run healthcare system is about to run out of funds, the Telegraph reported July 5^th.

And by 2020, the largest single-payer healthcare system in the world will be running a deficit six times larger than its annual operating budget, forcing the closure of up to 20 percent of Britain’s hospitals, which are already inundated with patients seeking free care.

A recent Telegraph investigation found “ambulance patients waiting up to eight hours” to be transferred to emergency rooms, adding that “the numbers forced to wait at least two hours outside A&Es (Accident & Emergency Centers)  “has risen by two thirds in just one year.”

Not all NHS employees are feeling the pinch. A recent contract gives senior hospital staff a 28 percent pay raise while allowing them to refuse to work evenings and weekends, the Telegraph reported.