By 2005, all the patients inside the NationalHealthServicesystem that have operations will have them through booked appointments, not the old waiting list system...
In one of the most memorable scenes from the former, 600 staff members of the NationalHealthService participated in a number that celebrated the British health-care system.
But famous examples of maladministration such as the troubled introduction of a new IT system for the NationalHealthService, chaos in the allocation of rural payments and tax credits, and ill-drafted private-finance initiatives seem to justify concern.
The rest of the money was placed in a sovereign wealth fund that has ever since lavished the British people with the most generous welfare system on the planet and made the NationalHealthService a beacon of medical research.
That kind of thinking has led to the botched computerisation in Britain's NationalHealthService, where billions of pounds and millions of precious hours are spent on a system that at best will be substandard and at worst dangerously leaky with patients' private medical data.