You can still go private.

Give me a link to the study please. personally I have never experienced long wait times, and definitely not for emergencies: my grandfather had an attack in his house last year. It was because of the quick response of the emergency services that he survived. So yeah ...

???

You quite clearly have never been injured in Britain have you. How dare you make assumptions about our medical system like that.

I've been to hospital dozens of times. They are always within about ten minutes away (Hell I live next to a hospital, about a minute away... if that.). Not once have I been turned away and not once have I waited longer than 20 minutes. And as for quality, care to explain why your healthcare system is significantly lower ranked than our healthcare system?

Jeez

Uhhh... Ever hear of Penicillin. It was discovered By good ol' Flemming in a St. Mary's in London. Paid by government etc. etc. Now you come up with a drug as influential as Penicillin that came out of business.

Also, for a bunch of fucking losers who let government do the work for them, those damn Europeans seem to be getting a hell of a lot better healthcare than the people in the US. How DARE they get better healthcare than the capitalistic, private one in the US!!!!

From the original linked article.

Responsiveness: The nations with the most responsive health systems are the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden. The reason these are all advanced industrial nations is that a number of the elements of responsiveness depend strongly on the availability of resources. In addition, many of these countries were the first to begin addressing the responsiveness of their health systems to people’s needs.

There is also a spreadsheet if you want to see the individual ratings.  I'm not sure where you live but maybe you live somewhere with quick response times?  I'm not sure.

I said last 100 years. Penicillin was first discovered in 1875.

Not only that, the days of a single brilliant scientist in a lab coming up with a medical breakthrough are behind us. Today it takes a lot more than that.

And if government programs were only allowed to use medical equipment and drugs discovered and invented by governments, you would still be living in the Stone Age. Science advances the world.

What you want would stop that science (or slow it down a thousand fold).

 This.  The main problem with health care is insurance companies always weasel out of paying everything owed to hospitals and ambulance agencies.  The costs to patients could be much lower if it wasn't for the insurance problems.  The ambulance company I used to work at has had to hire a lot of EMT's instead of paramedics recently because of these problems.  They can't afford to have so many paramedics anymore.  it's a sad state of affairs, but the socialist model is NOT the one we should be following.  Unfortunately Obama is trying to shift our entire countries model after france.  sigh.

Ahh, so the rich get better healthcare. How is that different then the US?

 Because the poor actually get healthcare. Apparently better healthcare than in the US (UK - 18, USA - 37).

You mean for the 18% that don't have insurance. For the other 82%, the US is better.