Why on earth must universal health care tend to produce "lack of incentive and general dilution of the applicant pool to medical schools"?

The National Health Service isn't perfect, and there are some doctors who aren't up to scratch and so forth, but I have absolutely no doubt that that is true under the American system. And there is no evidence I have ever seen which demonstrates that the quality of applicants to medical schools here is any lower than in America.

After all, we don't have a universal "socialised" legal system, and that doesn't mean there aren't some pretty incompetent lawyers about. As is being demonstrated daily, there some criminally incompetent bankers.

"Going private" doesn't in any way ensure that standards are high. The assumption that somehow "the free market" ensures high standards just does not stand up in practice. If we want to ensure high standards across the board we have to find other ways to achieve that, whatever system we adopt for paying for doctors, lawyers, whatever.