"However their healthcare is far superior to ours in many respects, such as cancer survival rates."

Meh. The standard "survival to X years from diagnosis" rewards overdiagnosis just as much as it does treatment success. You also want to look at the overall population mortality from cancer, which has the added benefit of measuring success in public health alongside success in treatment.

As it happens, the US is still ahead of the UK on this indicator (according to the GLOBOCAN database at http://www-dep.iarc.fr/, people in the US have an 11.2% risk of dying of cancer before the age of 75, as opposed to an 11.9% risk in the UK; hardly surprising, given that only 15% of the adult population of the US smoke, compared to 20% in the UK). But more to the point, other countries are ahead of both (10.2% risk in Sweden, for example), and this rather suggests that the US may not be the best model to emulate in order to better avoid deaths from cancer.

Dont you even think of public and private mix!!!! That is like setting yourselves back by millennia. Take the case of India - a severely heterogenous health care system with nearly 80% of health related expenditure originating in people's pockets! Private sector health care in India is of high quality, international in nature and is even supporting health related tourism because it is cost-effective for the top 1% of the world's population, but if at all you consider the equity angle, these hospitals are inaccesssible by 98% of the country.....financially, of course. Public oriented systems being so deeply routed in UK are susceptible to criticism, are too slow to innovate and change and are easily compared to white elephants, but they are iron-clad examples of equity. A value that is appreciated more in its absence.....NHS UK - please do not take the private road!

As far as the shakeup is concerned, there are mixed opinions on whether it will lead to imporvement in patient care. I personally think it is unsustainable for the NHS to remain the cumbersome and inefficient, wasteful civil service that it has become. It makes a mockery of intelligent clinicians. The public, in need of something to believe in, is increasingly bereft of good things to say about the NHS. Now that other people have suffered under the economic collapse, healthcare cannot be seen to be somehow more special than, say, education or housing. NHS has been free at the point of access, but it has never been free full stop: as taxpayers, we simply pay this enormous 'health provider' a premium to look after us all, and those who can't pay are subsidised by us. But nothing is free. Doctors in England are generally middle class and matters of money and payment are considered vulgar; people with profit motive seen as sinister thieves with no interest in actual outcome. If this were the case, private enterprise, which has had to stand on its own merits and methods, simply would not survive. I am not suggesting privatisation en masse is the way forward: I do think that better collaboration and mutual sharing of ideas, and a gentle suggestion that we ultimately have the same purpose, is. We cannot let ourselves be seduced by a false dichotomy and cartoon-like duelling of public vs private, with only one possible victor. Private companies, and social enterprises, and charities, have worked hand in hand with the NHS since it began. Creating bogeymen does not help move things forward. Private companies and current business thinking is very focussed on social entrepreneurship, social responsibility and benefitting sociaety in general. The corporations which don't take measured steps to be socially responsible, will suffer for it: just look at the banks, and look at BP. Private does not have to mean Gordon Gecko rubbing his hands in expectation of vast immoral profit, and we have to talk to these people if we want to make things better for all of us.