At the very least it's morally repugnant. The majority of the politicians are in vulnerable demographics, so at least they'll pay the price like everyone else.
It's actually a pretty common thing for big corporations: this decision was publicly taken by a government, so it couldn't end up unnoticed so easily, but this lack of morality is the standard way of doing. Take for example when big companies decide about the lives of third world countries within their board of directors, in private.
That's a false dichotomy: GDP is correlated with life expectancy, so you can't really choose one without the other. It's a question of which method saves more lives in the long-term, and UK appears have made their choice. Note that they most likely have much better understanding of the resources and capacity of NHS than U.S. scientists have.
I think they're clueless and are about to take down the NHS in self imposed DDOS. Death rates will go from 1% to in the neighborhood of 5% when people can't get medical care.
The number of ICU beds and respirators in the UK is public knowledge. It's also enough for less than 1% of the tsunami of cases I expect to swamp the NHS over the next sixty days.
Conspiracy theory : maybe the government wants to have nhs to collapse as a way to turn the public against it, then when the crisis is over nobody will object to its privatization? In a post-Brexit world with Trump in the whitehouse it would not be so irrealistic as a theory but without some hard facts it remains a theory...
At the very least it's morally repugnant. The majority of the politicians are in vulnerable demographics, so at least they'll pay the price like everyone else.