Comparison of UK vs. US
Dillon Pyron asks about a how the US system compares to the UK's. Well, yes there are budget problems in the UK. Many schemes were brought in in the NHS to make things more efficient. Most resulted in change but many incentivised (accidentally, perhaps) the wrong things. Pick up a paper from a few years back and read about the old people who got discharged from hospital to unblock a bed only to die in a nursing home a short while later.
The IT projects are a nightmare because every hospital has different systems. Most of the systems in the hospitals are not directly compatible; most of them speak HL7 v2.x, but the problem with that messaging standard is that in the case of many messages it specifies only the structure of the messages, and doesn't define data dictionaries for field contents. There are many different and large data sets for describing overlapping but not identical things (e.g. two major versions of the Read codes, ICD10, SNOMED-CT). HL7 v3 is much more complex and has features that make some aspects of message handling interesting; for example many of the "low level" element types in HL7v3 are defined recursively (in that they can contain embedded instances of themselves). To give you a flavour of the problems of interoperability, take a simple case, gender. In HL7v3 there are if I recall correctly 12 or so different conventions for decribing gender. Some of them use 0 or 1, some use M or F. Well, a simple translation table shold take care of that right? Well, no. Not all the data sets have the same number of members. Many have two, but some have three and some have four (yes, four values for "gender"). Bidirectional transformation is not even possible in a lossless fashion. Nobody wants to be in a position where they have to say "we transfered your records to another system, but the inteface programs garbled them and so we <insert mistake here>".
One of the problems with the UK's healthcare system is that the medics don't work for the NHS itself. The GPs are self-employed and the surgeons work for the hospitals, which are autonomous. The NHS is hardly in a position to force anybody to do anything.
The technical difficulties posed by choose and book are non-trivial. The C+B system will need to interface with every outpatient appointment system in every hospital in England and Wales. Those systems maintain appointments in real-time, so the C+B system cannot assume an appointment is available just because it was told 10 minutes or 10 seconds ago that it was still free. Many hospiotals were (I heard) hopelessly behind in implementing the technical requirements of C+B. It's a bit of a mess.
Though we may look at the progress of the NHS's IT programmes and put our heads in our hands, we should remember that nobody in the world has ever done what they are doing before. (Was that "with good reason!" I hear from the audience?).
In terms of healthcare, I think it is possible to get better healthcare elsewhere. But not at the same price. Lots of other markets are distinctly bipolar; for example, in the USA you can probably get excellent healthcare which will probably exceed the quality of the care available in much of the UK. But many people in the US don't get that. They get the stuff at the other end of the spectrum. Like (iirc) the worst infant mortality rate in the western world, despite more healthcare spending per head than the UK. So I suppose whether you prefer the UK or the US system depends on whether you would be comfortable being at the top of the heap without worrying about those at the bottom.