I worked for two years as an attending physician at the University of California, San Francisco, and the past 12 years as a consultant in the NHS. Rampant commercialism in health care doesn’t work well,1 2 but nor does health care by slavish social dogma, as in the United Kingdom.

In my experience in the United States, university medicine was of a high calibre; knowledge and procedural skill levels were the best I have encountered, and patients were treated …