This is CBS. I'm John Batser with Joseph Sternberg and member of the editorial board of the Wall

Strait Journal. He's in London, so he not only sees the London media all the time about

the National Health Service, but he senses as a possible customer of the NHS. Is what

we're witnessing now odd, different, an outlier of we've been through this cycle before?

Once upon a time there were strikes routinely across Great Britain in the 20th century.

Now there are strikes in all of these different professions, but the NHS seems to be more

than just striking. It seems to be either broken or they can't find a way to fix it.

Joe, the nurses, the nurses won't hire pay. The NHS itself has got a backlog that's

so overwhelming that it's a crisis for healthcare in all of Britain, the cancer treatment.

Now nine out of ten metrics for cancer, Britain is the worst in all of Europe. Is this

something that comes up routinely every few years? I don't recall it when I was there

in the low point of the 1970s. The NHS still was available to a student at Edinburgh

who wondered in and I had a complaint about sinuses. So 50 years later, is this an NHS

that is broken or do they have a remedy?

Well, I think that it's increasingly clear that the NHS is in a state of collapse right

now. Now, I mean winter crises are an annual tradition because the system habitually gets

overwhelmed by seasonal flu and other respiratory ailments and the hospitals start backing

up in patients' weight longer and longer in the emergency room and the GP's offices

are fooled overflowing and it's difficult to get appointments. So that was a tradition

before COVID. COVID really strained the system because during lockdowns and when the NHS

was repurposed to focus on this exclusively on COVID, they developed these enormous backlogs

of people waiting for routine diagnostics and other forms of treatment, like hip replacements

...