National Health Service Self-Sufficiency Hard to Achieve: Chart

(Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to make the National Health Service “self-sufficient” is a challenge for a system where more than 25 percent of doctors are trained abroad. Like Switzerland, which also faces a medical-staffing shortage and is trying to implement a 2014 vote to limit immigration, the country has to find a way of closing the gap that reducing foreign-trained workers will create, according to Bloomberg View's Therese Raphael. Self-sufficiency might make sense when it comes to energy, but no modern nation is self-sufficient in all things.

To contact the reporter on this story: Therese Raphael in London at traphael4@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jonathan I Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net, Sheldon Reback