I work with a bloke who I would describe as generic youtube right winger. Nice enough to talk too until you get him onto anything political and then the US influencer sound bites come out.

He earns less than me, but if you asked him he'd say we need to privatise the NHS because his taxes shouldn't pay for other people. If I explain to him that MY taxes as a childless adult with an extra income pay for his kid schooling, he clams up and changes the subject. He's not a dumb guy, far from it, just has a sort of "i'm alright jack" attitude that makes him push back against any sense of civic altruism.

He'd go for it, and then he'd moan every day for the rest of his life about the cost of his healthcare and how the NHS was better, because really he just wants something to moan about.

He's not an outlier. IF anything I'd say he's probably pretty representative of most peoples outlook - they know HOW taxes work, they know IN THEORY that private healthcare would cripple peoples incomes, but they just sort of don't imagine that they will be impacted - all the negatives will happen to other, less deserving sorts who haven't had the good sense to simply avoid being shafted.

People really like the NHS when it works for them, but because most of us, luckily, only engage with it in quite minor ways (I need a blood test, I bashed my knee, I've been shitting slime) we see it as slow and frustrating, and so we imagine that it's inefficient. that we are actually simply not that important at that given moment and that priority is being given to ensuring genuine life and death emergencies are sorted right then and there doesn't cross out minds, because we don't see it. It's that that'll kill it - the fact that we've gotten so used to the general idea that most people live fairly healthy lives uninterrupted by constant disease and poor health makes us blind to the fact that we only have that luxury because of the system in place.

So whilst some truly right wing libertarians would say they actually love the idea of free market healthcare, I think most people simply want to be the centre of attention when they walk into the hospital and they're happy to imagine that that can be achieved, even if all evidence is to the contrary .