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Though congressional Republicans agreed last week to back off the contentious politics of the Affordable Care Act this year, President Trump began Monday morning by stirring the health-care policy pot anew. In a tweet shortly after 7 a.m., the president lashed out at Democrats, saying they “are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working.” (Goldstein, 2/5)

Virtually no one in Britain considers the NHS perfect: The need for urgent reforms, such as reducing waiting times and adding doctors and hospital beds, was the declared point of the weekend demonstrations. But Trump's critique touched a raw nerve in a country that considers universal access to medical services to be something akin to a national treasure, under a system created just after World War II and now relied on by millions of people. (King, 2/5)

The rebuke was not long in coming. “NHS may have challenges but I’m proud to be from the country that invented universal coverage - where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance,” said U.K. Health Minister Jeremy Hunt said in a tweet. (Biggs, 2/5)

During the Brexit referendum in 2016, one of the key messages of the Leave campaign was to repatriate money from Brussels and spend it on the NHS. And perhaps to the bafflement of the global audience, it even featured in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, with a choreographed segment that included patients on hospital trollies. (Morales, 2/5)

In a tweet on Monday, President Trump claimed that thousands of people in Britain were marching because their country’s National Health Service was “going broke and not working,” and that Democrats pushing for universal health care in the United States were pursuing a similar failed model. Here is a closer look at his assertions. (Yeginsu, 2/5)