davebro - // It might work a damn sight better if it was privatised. //
One of the threads running through our current society is the fatuous Tory notion that services run better if they are turned into businesses.
The idea that private ownership of public utilities was a good idea has been proven to be utterly wrong for decades - the railways, gas, water, electricity, all of them needing to provide service, and only being concerned with profit.
If you make a service into a business, you immediately change its major focus from providing a service, to making money, and making money starts and ends with cutting services - as has been proven all the way down the line.
If as a company, you are beholden to your shareholders to make them money, then that is where your entire focus lies, and the notion of providing a service floats away into the distance.
Trying to provide utilities as profit-making entities has been nothing but disastrous.
The NHS is already top-heavy with suits making decisions based on money-saving as an obsession, and the idea that it should bow to shareholders would see the end of the notion of care at all, replaced by the need to generate profit.