f you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
