This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batcher with Joseph Sternberg, member of the editorial

board of the Wall Street Journal. He writes politically economics. He's based in London.

The headlines in the London Times, junior doctor strike, keeping patients safe, quote,

will be hard. NHS bosses goes to subhead, wore an emergency cover for unprecedented 96-hour

walkout is very fragile. There's a picture of what I presume to be either junior doctors

or officials in a hospital reduced to clear, raised this hand held side. Doctors now 30%

off pay and then there's a hashtag for pay restoration. The numbers are surprising.

Junior doctors, including other personnel, GPs, paramedics, nurses, pharmacists, are paid

very poorly in the National Health Service. And yet the National Health Service was given

great credit for fighting the pandemic. Joe, is the NHS in question? I thought it was

like social security here. The third rail, you don't touch.

NHS is just such a complicated beast in British society and British politics because on the

one hand it is increasingly clear to everyone that the system is just creaking and that it's

not going to be able to keep up with the demand for its services and that it's struggling

to find the resources to attract and pay the kind of staff that it needs, especially

given the demands on its services that it's facing from a population that does seem to

be getting older and sicker. And yet somehow they haven't quite reached the point where you

can openly say that they need to completely change the system. So you do periodically hear

nibbling around the edges of various reform ideas, which some of them are promising because

they would contain within them the seeds of broader reform down the road. But so far no one seems

to be entirely ready to admit that if Britain is going to have a functional healthcare system,

10 years from now, it's not going to be the NHS in its current form.

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