Patrick Cockburn · Leap in the Dark: Irish Unity
Once the NHS in the North [of Ireland] was one of the few institutions seen as providing a better service than the confused private/state healthcare system in the South. But now, McBride writes, the NHS in Northern Ireland ‘has become an elaborate fiction. It promises to treat everyone free at the point of need, but can’t … some people wait a decade for a hip replacement.’ Instead there is a two-tier health system, with the better-off buying private health insurance ‘while the poor are left to live in agony and die before their time’. The problem isn’t just lack of money – Northern Ireland spends more per person on healthcare than any region in the UK aside from Scotland – but that the system is badly run
Hip replacement, also known as the operation of the century.