The day after the United Kingdom's general election last year, newly appointed Labour Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting proclaimed that Britain's socialized health care system was "broken."
Streeting's statement, while certainly correct, would have been political suicide just a few years ago. Criticism of the National Health Service (NHS) has long been seen as heretical. As in other religions, heretics were judged not on the merit of their criticism, but on the mere fact that they dared challenge received wisdom. As former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson put it in 1992, "The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion."
