Three Letter Acronyms #1

Because it's the national religion of a major country.

In terms of health outcomes it fairs on a par with Algeria - far below, say, Sweden's or Italy's (though above the US when you factor in those without access there). Few, if any, have copied it. But it's blasphemy to admit either thing in the UK, and so people don't know better - hence incorrect comments like Tish418's.

Oh, it's also one of the world's top-5 biggest employers.

Where is that data coming from sihollett? I searched a fair few rankings without finding it, and would be interested to see. Don't disagree that criticism of the NHS is blasphemous in UK politics, though plenty of Tories want to move it further towards the private sector, and complaining about it in general life isn't uncommon. These are some results I found from the last WHO ranking of health systems I could find (2000, admittedly dated) picking out the countries you mention. Closest to your statement is the second list, but still quite different by ranking (unfortunately can't tell from it how large or small the difference is between places):

Overall health system performance: Italy 2nd, UK 18th, Sweden 23rd, USA 37th, Algeria 81st

Performance by level of health: Italy 3rd, Sweden 21st, UK 24th, Algeria 45th, USA 72nd

Attainment of goals by level of health: Sweden 4th, Italy 6th, UK 14th, USA 24th, Algeria 84th

If percentage of the world population is an indication for things, there are a lot of weird assumption to be made about all sorts of things,. Well actually, not weird conclusions at all, but highest population usually gets outweighed by other things.

I hope my point comes across, transferring my thoughts into english is going less good than usual ;) )

Edit: like I am sure people know more about the UK than they do about pakistan. But pakistan has one of the biggest population of the world ( after china, indonesia, usa and brazil. I could ve chosen all but the usa for this example, but I think pakistan makes a stronger case)

I was watching some British show on YouTube (forgot what it's called) about people with weird medical conditions and they talked about the NHS a few times and I guess it just stuck. Not to mention National Health System (I hope that's what it stands for) is pretty intuitive.

The same way we would know anything about america. Yet looking at a lot of comments (not everyone though) apparently they seem to think the rest of the world knows or should know every obscure little detail about the usa (like products we dont have here or tiny cities that are not ever in the news)

I don't think the NHS is out of place here. In terms of employee numbers its 1.6M is 400 times that of the Utah university and over 10 times that of the car manufacturer. Its budget of £137Bn is nearly twice that of said car company and over 100 times that of the university so its not out of the question that someone has heard of it to recall in a quiz. (Others on the list of course have more people involved and bigger budgets).

definitely less out of place than a university in another country. I hear NHS mentioned frequently, the university never.

(I have heard of MIT, ofxord, cambridge... and em... pretty sure another usa one aswell)

(caltech springs into my head, but no idea where that comes from, sometimes you know things you didnt know you knew... and still dont feel like you know...but you came up with it and it is right, so I guess you do know...)

the flippers did it, the death was overkill

Yeah, but the panda was on steroids, so there should be an asterisk next to the initials.

yep (not a brand though, but still a more fitting connection)