London – Despite being headed by a genuine star and staged in one of the main theaters in London, it seemed unlikely that an expanding and problematic public service caused night after night of standing ovations.
But that is what happened with “Nye”, an unlikely success about the creator and the history of Origin, of the National Health Service of the taxpayers of Great Britain.
The work, written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris, arrived at a turning point for the NHS, as is known. Almost 80 years after it was founded, the medical service once promoted when the envy of the world is “broken” and suffers the “greatest crisis in its history,” says the government. The crisis in this national mother rock is part of greater discomfort in the heart of British culture: growing prices, stagnant wages and crumbled public services.
“I am terrified, not only for the NHS, but for our whole society,” said Michael Sheen, who played Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the founder of the NHS, A NBC News in an interview. “Once they are shot down, so I suppose people will think about what they have lost.”
Sheen, 56, better known by the international public as Tony Blair in “The Queen”, David Frost in “Frost/Nixon” and the Aziraphale angel in the Amazon Prime “Good Omens” series, has spent much of the last two years perfecting his representation of Bevan, the socialist politician who dragged out of the coal mines of Wales to existence.
Although it is a second nature for the British, the ideal of NHS is not familiar to many Americans: the British have universally free medical attention at the access point, from ambulances that attend car accidents to insulin for diabetes until cancer care until delivery. Although some people have private insurance, the idea of having to choose between disease and financial ruin is shocking in the United Kingdom
Now the Labor Party, which created the then Radical NHS in 1948, is fighting against its own economic limitations and unpopularity of record establishment. It has a colossal task if it is about fixing the crumbled hospitals full of doctors with excess of work and runners with bed lining.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer must change a giant whose budget of 200 billion English pounds ($ 269 billion) represents about 40% of all government expenses, and whose 1.4 million employees are the seventh largest workforce in the world. In the United States, only the Department of Defense, Walmart and Amazon exceed it in number.
Through all this, the ideal core nhs endures. All in the United Kingdom have a history of a relative, or themselves, who receive the type of world class care that exercises terrifying financial tension for millions of Americans. (In the last six years, the mother of this reporter has had a single mastectomy and reconstruction, as well as three titanium plates in a shattered ankle, without having to pay a pound for attention).
But just as common are the stories of crazy waiting, for a long time, in overloaded emergency rooms or delays in a week just to see a general practitioner of the community. Many critics blame the extensive crises of the years of sub-financing of the conservative government of 2010-2024, whose response to the 2008 financial crisis was to make drastic cuts to public services.
It may not be surprising that a liberal audience in London responded with applause and tears in Bevan’s hagiography at the National Theater. Although relatively unknown in society in general, admirers see Bevan as a founding father of Modern Britain; His NHS ideal today is not only popular, but defines the country itself.
“It is far from perfect,” said Alison Ferris, 40, nurse in a hospital in Canterbury, in southeastern England. “But I do the best I can for anyone who comes in front of me. I deal with all patients as if I deal with my loved ones.”
Although the concept remains revered, public satisfaction in the NHS in practice extended to 52% in 2023 from a maximum of 70% in 2010, according to King Fund, a main tank tank that tracks British medical care.
“We have to fight for the NHS, just as the NHS fought when it was created,” said Ferris’s mother, Caroline Heggie, 70, a hospital union representative, who as her daughter had come to see the last night of “Nye” at the National Theater last month. “We cannot follow the path of privatization, we cannot follow the path of America. That is what we face.”
Like Bevan, Sheen is a Welsh fire brand without fear of using his leftist policy. But he also lived for 14 years in Los Angeles, so he knows very well how life is without socialized medical attention.
“The idea of this medical care system that we have here seemed so oblivious to them,” says Sheen, who now lives in his hometown Wales of Port Talbot, about his former US hosts. He says that “seeing people go to hospitals with serious injuries or diseases, and that they are asked to produce their verification book before they can be treated” would surprise most of the British.
The crisis in the NHS coincides with an increase in hostility towards immigrants, although they are often doctors, nurses and hospital cleaners. Almost 20% of NHS personnel have a non -British nationality, with Indians, Filipinos, Nigerianos, Irish and Poles that constitute most of their number.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Party with a hard and ally right -wing reform and friend of President Donald Trump, is taking some surveys to become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain. It has become the first future leader in questioning the financing model to use taxes to finance NHS, historically taboo.
“It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work,” Farage told NBC News British partner, Sky News in May. “We are worsening the money that any other country, particularly those European neighbors.”
However, opposing Farage’s proposal leaves the spectrum of privatization open, which many say it has been increasing even before the 2012 Health and Social Attention Law opened the NHS to the offers of private contractors.
Farage is not the only unsatisfied person. In fact, the NHS has come out of being a world leader in many metrics.
“Corridor of Attention” is now a crisis throughout the year, and the number of people waiting for 12 hours or more to be admitted in an emergency room rose from 47 in the summer of 2015 to 74,150 this summer. The objectives have been delayed for years in everything, since times of ambulance assistance to cancer diagnoses. Meanwhile, a waiting list of 7 million people means that many people feel abandoned for months, with pain, before receiving hip or knee replacement and other types of surgery.
There is ample evidence that suggests that the economic austerity policies imposed during 14 years of conservative government of the party are at least partially guilty, according to Max Warner, senior research economist of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a London research group.
“It is true that many NHS performance measures in the 2010 were getting worse in general after starting relatively well,” he said. “Although it is worth saying that productivity grew, so it is a nuanced image and causality is difficult.”
The conservatives argued that they maintained the expense of the NHS, protecting it from the brutal cuts that crushed almost all the other government department at that time. But this annual growth of 2% still did not reach the annual average of 3.8% since the 1980s, and according to critics it was insufficient to deal with a population that ages and the growing prices of avant -garde medications.
Far from the envy of the world, Great Britain has been wearing up to spend 37 billion pounds ($ 53 billion) in health services each year, well below Germany, France and Australia, a historical review found last year.
The current Labor Government has outlined plans to increase spending to about 3%, an improvement, but still below what many defenders expected. In his annual Labor Party conference this week, Starmer announced that a digital review called NHS Online would be launched in 2027, describing it as “a new chapter in the history of our NHS.”
Ultimately, whatever the model, the cash is key, according to Roy Lilley, who led a NHS hospital in the 1990s as president of Homewood NHS Trust in Surrey, west of London.
“It doesn’t matter how you pay your medical attention,” said Lilley, today, a consultant whose newsletter reaches 300,000 inboxes. “If you get it out of your” safe ‘pocket, or get it out of your marked pocket’ taxes’, it’s still your pants. ”
However, it is still optimistic, pointing out some metrics that expect improvements and a general recovery of the hammer block of the pandemic, which drained resources and doctors with mental scars.
Even so, Sheen, never shy to mix the acting with activism, believes that it is not coincidence that the NHS is in crisis just when its history of origin begins to disappear from living memory.
“The crisis that seems to be experiencing makes it even more important to return to the beginning and look at what was behind the NHS foundation and what the principles were,” he said. “It becomes incredibly important to tell the story and remember people how it really was, so that we do not forget it.”
