Britain’s health-care system looks rather as it did in the 1930s

ON JANUARY 9thNHSA&ENHSNHSNHS junior doctors in England concluded six days of industrial action, the longest strike in the history of the National Health Service (). The walkout, called as part of a dispute over wages, will have led to more pressure on Accident & Emergency () departments and to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of hospital appointments.That will worsen a huge backlog of people waiting for treatment as a result of , delays caused by the covid-19 pandemic and other industrial action. Some 6.4m patients were already on waiting lists before the latest strike; 42% of the treatments on the lists have a waiting time of more than 18 weeks. Britons are getting used to the n when they need it. Indeed, health care in Britain is taking on some of the features of the interwar system that Aneurin Bevan, the Labour minister who helped found the in 1948, sought to replace.