I love the NHS. I know this is a fashionable thing to say, but it also has a whiff of naivety. It is like saying I love autumn, or chocolate. Sure, those things are great, but they are also big things that are complex and loving them unconditionally seems to avoid important criticisms (the waiting lists for essential surgeries, the leaves on the train tracks and taking your dog to the vet every Easter, respectively).
I mean, of course, that I love the idea of a nationalised health service, rather than the dysfunctional, underfunded service we have, where staff are even more overworked and underpaid now than they were when I left more than a decade ago. I love the idea of a system in which our freedoms in a pandemic aren’t contingent on avoiding it becoming overwhelmed – despite it coming close to being overwhelmed in a normal year (and, as I write, Covid cases and hospital admissions are once again rising). But I didn’t truly grasp the big idea – that health care has to be free at the point of access – until I got ill.
