Rarely does a day go by without a shocking National Health Service (NHS) story appearing in the British press.

The theme is familiar across the whole country. Hospitals that seem to induce more illness than they cure; incompetent doctors or nurses who regard themselves as technicians rather then carers; staff that treat patients with contempt, especially the elderly; foreign doctors who don’t speak English, and nurses untrained to use specialist equipment.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown doubled the amount of money going into the NHS. Most of it went into higher salaries and perks for staff. What did trickle down to the patients was either misallocated or inefficiently spent. It was recently reported that an American heart pacemaker that was sold to US hospitals for $50 was bought by the NHS for £5000 a unit.

The case of Stafford hospital has become totemic for the service as a whole. Hundreds of unnecessary deaths were identified in a report last year caused by neglect, bad practice and sheer incompetence by staff. It was dubbed a “third world institution”, which is probably an insult to the third world.

A consequence of the collapse in public confidence is that many people are flocking to private schemes such as Bupa Healthcare Insurance to give them and their families peace of mind. Left-wing MPs condemn this, of course, although quite a few of them go private themselves.

Isn’t it time the nation woke up to the desperate need to allow the private sector to take up much more of the strain in the country’s ballooning, dysfunctional healthcare sector?