It’s unlikely that full or even partial privatisation of the NHS will happen.
We should ask ourselves why, even after years of Tory government we still have a struggling but existing NHS and the answer is simple; it’s cheap.
We spend very little per head of population on healthcare and our outcomes are ‘good enough’ on a population level.
Individually you’d get better healthcare in many Western European health systems but the cost to the country of introducing this is too high.
When you look at the world rankings of healthcare systems the NHS comes out on top for efficiency ie outcomes for cost. It was top of the WHO rankings because it is remarkably efficient (even though those of us who work in it would consider it remarkably inefficient)
Having a National system with very little alternative suppresses staff wages which are a major cost in any healthcare system. Nurses could earn double their wage in many other countries. It even suppresses wages at the top with top consultants paid less than they would be in other countries.
Systems to assess cost liability, charge people and chase non payers are expensive to set up, run and administer. There’s a reason the NHS currently makes only a token effort to chase foreign nationals for payment. It’s actually cheaper to accept the costs and let it go than pursue them. Imagine the cost of having a team responsible for collecting and managing payment at every GP surgery.
Also using GP’s as gatekeepers is a massive cost saving. If we had free access to specialists that would cost far more, at the moment GP’s limit the number of people who see specialists. Of course that means some people who need to see them don’t but overall on a population level it works well enough. Enough people see specialists in a timely fashion.
We need to be honest about the NHS. What is its purpose? If it is to provide good enough healthcare outcomes for low cost, it’s working perfectly. But if we want better healthcare outcomes or higher patient satisfaction then we need to be prepared to pay more.
However I think we can rest easy that with a growing aging population no government is going to fully privatise healthcare. It would be much much too expensive. The NHS is the ultimate austerity healthcare system; cheap and good enough.