If i could overhaul the health systems of UK i would say people should pay the first £500 of their treatment, £20 to see a GP, pay for your own X-Rays etc, this would bring in billions of additional revenue in the case of the UK, but if things get really bad and you get a serious disease or chronic condition its covered by the state.
A
partly insurance-based scheme will address some of those issues (as it does in some EU countries).
The problem with charging people £20 to see a GP (the New Zealand system, more or less) is that you also effectively have to exempt some very substantial groups of people from the charge (those on benefits, those "poor and with cancer", pregnant women, etc. etc.?) and you end up with the same kind of idea as the exemptions from prescription charges, net of which only about 30% of people actually pay the charge.
It's also a relatively expensive system to run, administratively.
For both these reasons, it actually raises comparatively little, in overall NHS-spending terms.
One of my suggestions would be for the state to offer to pay all medical school fees for students willing to contract to work full-time for the NHS for their first 10-15 years after qualifying: a long-term, gradual, almost "cultural" change in med-economics which would relatively
inexpensively boost the ever-rapidly-declining number of GP's, saving a
lot of money in the long term by not importing already-qualified doctors through
very expensive financial incentives, paying inflated agency fees for locum cover, etc. etc.
The NHS currently spends a fortune on private medicine and private medical facilities, many of which (surprisingly?) are actually of a qualitatively
lower standard than its own resources.
But until the NHS is completely de-politicized, no successful, long-term changes are effectively available, in my opinion.