Not the OP but most private healthcare in the UK is delivered by doctors, nurses and other healthcare practitioners who have either been trained by or are still working for the NHS. If you need anything more serious than minor surgery you are likely to be treated in an NHS facility by NHS staff, and many of your tests will be done in NHS labs, so even as a private patient you are still relying on the NHS being functional. Chunks of the NHS have already been privatised and compared to the systems in most other European countries it is chronically underfunded and has poor outcomes. Will it break down? Arguably it already is, but this is mostly due to a decade of ideologically driven cuts, two decades of part privatisation and three decades of continuous reorganisations that waste vast amounts of money and benefit no one.