Claimed by Glenn Beck and Daniel Hannan.
http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/08/07/daniel-hannan-sounds-the-alarm.php
18,000 according to the NIH home page.. I’m not sitting through 6 minutes of listening to those clowns to hear the exact claim. Maybe they meant the sum of all institutions with NIH funding?
Perhaps the NIH (National Institutes of Health) has only 18,000 employees, but the OP asked about the NHS (National Health Service). According to Wikipedia, the NHS in the UK does employ about 1.4 million people, if you count part-time staff, local social workers, etc.
The Mayo Clinc employs 28,000 people out of Rochesters total population of 100,000 people.
It wouldn’t surprise me that the NHS employs that much. Mayo Clinic serves 2 million people per year.
This site says 1.3 million, so I guess the answer is “yes”, more or less.
The NHS, unlike many (most?) national health care plans, directly employs most of the non-general practice doctors and nurses in the country. Hence the size of it’s staff.
So it’s true but not really a fair comparison then.
Comparison to what? Were they implying that the “public option” that is (was?) under consideration in the US would take millions of bureaucrats to run?
It directly employs all the staff (GPs, health visitors, midwives, nurses and receptionists) at GP practices too, doesn’t it?
Daniel Hannan, cited in that article, isn’t to be taken seriously if he talks about the NHS being a necessary evil in wartime. The NHS wasn’t set up until 1947 and wasn’t actually operational until 1948.
the NHS used to employ far more than that because it has since farmed most of the ancillary cleaning and catering and maintenance and computer staff out to contractors it has little control over, so that the hospitals are reverting to their pre-NHS days of dirty death houses. Nursing wages and numbers have been kept down so that many leave for private agency nursing and have to be hired back at higher rates.
From the start, the one group of people the NHS never employed direct were senior medical and surgical consultants who get a retainer and consultancy fees for a minimum weekly attendance - and they make sure it is minimum!
The net result of 25 years of creeping privatisation inspired by American models has been to lower standards and raise costs. The only people of course not affected by cuts are the management responsible for organising cuts. You can be sure that no cuts will ever fall near them!
Whoops. Well, it was late. The NHS employing that many people sounds perfectly plausible.
A history of the NHS, which someone once posted a link to, said it came about because the government paid for healthcare for those who had to leave London during the Blitz, and had to set up hospitals in rural regions which got an influx of Londoners. This was so well liked that when it was made the law for everyone after the war, it didn’t inspire a lot of debate.
“Fair”? Is this a competition?
I just checked and I was wrong - GPs are (nearly always) self-employed.
Considering that GPs do most healthcare for most people (including most of the aspects of maternity care and other such healthcare areas that you might not expect to involve a GP beyond the initial referral), and considering that most GPs are NHS-only, that adds a huge number of self-employed staff to the NHS roster. they’re not technically employees of the NHS, but but the NHS is the only organisation they work for.
But it wasn’t the NHS by any means. Really not very similar at all. It’s disingenuous to build your argument* on a base which simply doesn’t exist.
*Hannan’s, not you, Voyager’s. (That sounds almost like a film …)
The linked article from the OP was comparing the NHS to the US’s healthcare system.
These guys think - or at least imply - that anyone who works for the government is a “bureaucrat,” unless they’re in the military, in which case there is no bureacracy 
That discounts anyone who is a technician, scientist, physician, nurse, administrative assistant, pilot, park ranger, etc., etc.