What can you tell us Yanks about Healthcare in the UK

And if these doctors and nurses were British then all their training has been payed for by British taxpayers. Yet they are then allowed to deplete the NHS by going to work in private medicine and increase the amount of time the people who payed for their training have to wait for treatment.

Increasingly, though, services provided by the NHS are commissioned by people in the public purse from private companies. So, in some forms of complex care you might find yourself in a private facility, run by a private company, but with everything paid for by the NHS. There's no longer a clear-cut distinction between NHS and private. In fact, the NHS is moving to separate its commissioning functions from its provider functions completely to encourage competition between public providers and private providers.