Over the last ~3 years I've noticed a lot more private healthcare being advertised direct to consumers, particularly in London and particularly targeting busy, high earning professionals.
I'd have expected this to go down pretty poorly because while high earning busy people tend to be more open to spending to fix problems, the idea of paying for healthcare here is nuts – you either use NHS services, or your employer gives you private healthcare.
I wonder if, as London becomes increasingly diverse with more workers from overseas, the acceptance will increase as there are more people who don't have that cultural blocker to paying directly for healthcare (rather than via taxes).
Indeed, I have definitely seen an increase in "convenience" or "time" driven offerings for private healthcare - usually focused around opening hours or "avoiding waiting".
Some seemed to be trying to deliver NHS services (video/remote consultations available by "gig-working" GPs in evenings etc.), but others seemed to be increasingly trying to provide testing or other preventative/diagnostic services (blood tests, 7-day health check-ups booked same-day etc.)
I guess to some extent there likely will (among high earning, time-strapped immigrant workers) be an increased appetite to pay for healthcare directly, but for those who are aware of their immigration NHS access charge, they might well come to adopt the "I already pay for this" view. There's also a scalability question beyond London, where typical incomes mean the only people using any kind of private healthcare will be those with company-paid schemes.
There are some interesting ethical quandaries around what the NHS could do to improve its service (which could potentially hurt private sector rivals) - from some people's perspectives, the NHS could allow people paying privately to get things faster (without compromising on clinical need based priority) if it meant the service was better funded through revenues from those private patients going towards cutting wait times more generally. The British pastime of queueing could negatively impact on perceptions of anything like this though (even though you can already pay a little extra for an expedited next-day passport renewal etc.)
I know some hospital trusts have setups with private wards where NHS staff deliver private care (without bypassing priority by clinical need), and revenues from this are reinvested into regular services.
This is money for convenience trade off. Just like some people pay double for food through uber eats. I use both the NHS and private healthcare. There is definitely an upper limit on this but if I can spend 10 minutes rather than an hour that is probably worth £100 to me.
I'd have expected this to go down pretty poorly because while high earning busy people tend to be more open to spending to fix problems, the idea of paying for healthcare here is nuts – you either use NHS services, or your employer gives you private healthcare.
I wonder if, as London becomes increasingly diverse with more workers from overseas, the acceptance will increase as there are more people who don't have that cultural blocker to paying directly for healthcare (rather than via taxes).