Pretty much everyone knows that the NHS is paid by taxpayers (NB I have met people working the UK public sector who had never given a moments thought to where the money they spent actually comes from, but they are pretty rare).
Its a local mythological belief that if you remove universal services which basically everyone requires from our universal tax collection system and insert vast teams of middlemen competing with each other to build a dilbertian confuseopoly, that those highly paid middlemen none the less somehow magically reduce aggregate net total cost to the society. Which would be hilarious as a parody if it wasn't being presented as factual policy.
I wouldn't hold up the NHS as the best possible health system but it does kind of work given the relatively small amount of money we pay into it - it is telling that the book by the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, called his book about its creation "In Place of Fear":
http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/about/Pages/nhscoreprinc...
Pretty much everyone knows that the NHS is paid by taxpayers (NB I have met people working the UK public sector who had never given a moments thought to where the money they spent actually comes from, but they are pretty rare).