One of my early grown-up jobs in my 20s was as a reporter for The Independent and one of my first assignments was to look into the awful conditions junior doctors had to work under. Some 40 years on, that problem still goes unresolved, probably worsened by student loans.

If you’re a regular user of the NHS, you’ll have seen how incredibly hard everyone works often only to be faced with complaints and insults. Those insults then get compounded when successive governments fail to deal with these long-suffering people who feel compelled to go on strike as we again see today and their opposition leaders spout solutions which they didn’t introduce when they were in charge.

I have an idea which I don’t see being promoted here and which could significantly ease pressure off the NHS if politicians had the guts to pursue.  When America introduced the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare), we thought that it was lucky that we had the NHS so didn’t need that.

The main measure of the act was to ban insurance companies from refusing health plans to customers who had existing conditions.  It was one of Barack Obama’s lasting legacies (though unsurprisingly Trump wants to overturn it).

What if we were to introduce something along those lines here? A lot of people I know don’t take private health care even though they are able to afford to because their existing conditions wouldn’t be covered so they’d be spending needlessly. The last major NHS survey found that 46% of adults have existing conditions. When it can often take months or even years to get an NHS hospital appointment, when there are undoubtedly a significant  number of people who could comfortably and happily pay for cover to get a rapid private consultation, when the poor and less fortunate sit in the same queue alongside the more affluent I wonder if we’re not missing a trick to ease up the waiting lists to make them easier on those who don’t have that option.

If we had a leader like Obama with the courage to guide health insurance companies (who between them are valued at £8bn in the UK alone) down this route, we’d be able to embrace the following positive consequences: the providers would see a flood of new customers signing up and the NHS would be freed up to serve those most disadvantaged and more likely to have compound economic consequences from huge waiting lists preventing them for working or leading a healthier life.

It would likely also have the following negative consequence: people who already have private cover will undoubtedly see a rise in their premiums, though some kind of governance against greed can surely be applied here. And although I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, I’m not able to calculate whether the rise in the number of memberships and a reasonable rise in existing customers’ premiums would offset the rise in the number of payouts (currently £4bn a year) will be anywhere near close enough to cancelling each other out.

But if we’re committed to honouring the founding principles of the NHS, if we really do believe that we’re all in this together and if we were ever to have another visionary political leader, wouldn’t the shake-up be worth it?