Nearly 8 million people on medical waiting list amid UK’s growing health care crisis: Report

The U.K. is suffering from a medical crisis that has nearly eight million patients desperately waiting for oftentimes critical care.

As of June, 7,622,949 U.K. patients were waiting for treatment, with 302,693 of them having been waiting for over a year, according to Health & Protection magazine.

“[I]n 58,024 cases they were waiting more than 65 weeks, in 2,621 cases they were waiting more than 18 months, and in 120 cases they were waiting more than two years,” the magazine notes.

That’s a long time …

“It’s no wonder the UK economy is weighed down by high sickness absence rates and low productivity,” Brett Hill, the head of health and protection at Broadstone, told the magazine.

“Access to timely and effective primary healthcare, whether that’s a GP appointment, talking therapies, or physiotherapy, is critical to preventing more serious, debilitating conditions that can force people out of work,”  he added.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has for his part promised to unveil a 10-year plan to fix the U.K.’s socialized National Health Service (NHS).

“Working people can’t afford to pay more, so it’s reform or die,” he recently said. “Only fundamental reform and a plan for the long term can turn around the NHS and build a healthy society. That won’t be easy, it won’t be quick. It will take a 10-year plan.”

He added that he will not approve any additional NHS funding until the agency is fully reformed.

Speaking with Fox News, Dr. Marc Siegel of the NYU Langone Medical Center stressed that these numbers from the U.K. should serve as “a huge warning” to Americans.

“The National Health Service, which started in 1948 with the great idea to take care of everyone in England, is broken,” he said. “We’re talking about nearly eight million people there who are waiting for health care … many more than 18 weeks. How could you wait 18 weeks if you’re having a heart problem or you have an infection?”

Good question.

Delays also exist in the U.S., though they don’t tend to be as severe.

“Even here … 26% of the people in the U.S. are waiting more than two months for their health care already,” Siegel said. “Even people who are getting it from their employers are waiting.”

Asked why he believes a delay exists in the U.S., Siegel pointed to the policies promoted by Vice President Kamala Harris, among others.

“The first problem is that Kamala Harris and others are talking about coverage all the time — but coverage doesn’t mean care,” he said.

“You’ve got your coverage, you’ve got your insurance, maybe you’ve got public insurance — almost 50% of the U.S. already has Medicare or Medicaid — but do you have a doctor? Do you have access to the care you need? That’s the question, and that’s [being] obscured,” he added.

He also referenced Democrats’ habit of proffering healthcare to criminal aliens.

“Illegal migrants homeless on the streets, with illnesses that are spreading, flooding the emergency rooms — that’s going to be a greater and greater problem, whether you give them health insurance or not,” he said. “But if you give them health insurance, that breaks the bank.”

Speaking of which, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris, at one point signed legislation granting taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits to criminal aliens.

Walz specifically “expanded MinnesotaCare, a state-funded low-income health insurance marketplace, to cover the care of illegal immigrants,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. He did so at a cost of $59 million per year.

Vivek Saxena

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