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British NHS May Soon No Longer Offer Free Care
An anonymous reader writes "Coinciding with challenges in the rollout of the U.S. Affordable Care Act are challenges for NHS. The Independent reports, 'A National Health Service free at the point of use will soon be "unsustainable," if the political parties do not come forward with radical plans for change before the 2015 election, top health officials have warned. Stagnant health spending combined with ever rising costs and demand mean the NHS is facing "the most challenging period in its 65-year existence," the NHS Confederation said ... In a frank assessment of the dangers faced by the health service, senior officials at the confederation say that the two years following the next general election will be pivotal in deciding whether the NHS can continue to provide free health care for all patients. "Treasury funding for the service will be at best level in real terms," they write. "Given that demand continues to rise, drugs cost more, and NHS inflation is higher than general inflation, the NHS is facing a funding gap estimated at up to £30bn by 2020."' From The Guardian: 'Our rose-tinted view of the NHS has to change.' More at the Independent, Mirror, and Telegraph."
I sense controversy in the air, a lot of it.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
>And this is the system Democrats want the United States to emulate?
No. Where did you get that idea?
The ACA simply makes it easier to get insurance and requires people to purchase it.
There is nothing free about it.
Yes... Just fine. Those stories of long waits, or unavailable diagnostic care are just rumors, I am sure...
I am sure that some are very good. I also know that others are not. Which one do you bet our government will put out? You know... The government that gave us the TSA...
Keep some perspective. It still costs half as much per person (normalized to GDP/capita). Our medical industry increases its costs faster than inflation too, but when the free market raises prices and another 50k people lose coverage, it isn't news, it's business as usual.
Actually, if you follow international news at all, there has been a strong Conservative/Tory assault on the NHS for several years now. The assault comes in the form of privatization and the introduction of the 'free' market to the health care ecosystem. This system, if anything, is attempting to emulate the system put in place with the ACA, and the right in the UK has made it clear that they would like do what the right in America has been arguing for this whole time in terms of health care. Would the Dems have desired to emulate the original NHS, prior to its evisceration? Yes. Now? Not so much. Here's a bit of light reading on the topic, which is anything but hard to find. (Yes, they do tend to be from more leftwing sources, however, they have good information on what has been done to the NHS recently.) http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11935 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/farewell-to-the-nhs-19482013-a-dear-and-trusted-friend-finally-murdered-by-tory-ideologues-8555503.html http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=676:people-will-die-the-end-of-the-nhs-part-1-the-corporate-assault-&catid=25:alerts-2012&Itemid=69
And that's assuming no GDP growth during that time. Actual GDP percentage will probably remain constant or rise only slightly. As a resident of a country (the USA) that spends more like 17% of its GDP on health care for outcomes that are no better (and arguably worse), I still think the UK is getting a great deal. Citations:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/02/uk-healthcare-spending-gdp
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS
http://shr.sagepub.com/content/2/7/60.long
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
The NHS is currently underfunded, just now the government in charge would love to abolish the NHS purely for ideological reasons. Since the global recession, politics in the UK has been fought over the issues of, public spending cuts, cost of living, the welfare state, immigration; the NHS has been shunned to the side and because of this has allowed funding to minimized. A (phony) promise was made by the government back in 2009 to protect NHS spending, an increase in spending was in fact claimed but the truth is polarising.
It's privatisation in the back door, under fund it, make it under perform, all of a sudden privatisation becomes an easy argument to make.
NHS has clearly been under pressure for quite some time. Strange that it rarely comes up in discussion.
Complaints about doctors 'double in five years'
Crackdown on migrants rights to NHS and council homes
Patients facing eight-hour waits in ambulances outside A&E departments
Watchdog issues NHS with financial health warning
Why do the UK's cancer survival rates still lag behind the rest of Europe?
Thousands of NHS operations cancelled because of blunders as complaints about standard of treatment rise
The frightening truth: NHS-managers are incentivized to ignore problems
Hungry, thirsty, unwashed: NHS treatment of the elderly condemned
Dying for a drink: Over 12,000 killed by dehydration in hospitals every year
Labour must bear the blame for the shameful decline of the NHS
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Single-payer is what they wanted. ACA is what they could get past the Republicans.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
At present, the NHS is still one of the more efficient healthcare systems out there - way more so than the US system, for example.
Healthcare is getting more expensive, and I would imagine that in the next few decades technologies such as synthetic organs will make it even more so. What if every elderly patient wanted a new synthetic heart, lungs, kidneys at a cost of £5,000,000 each? At some point it becomes a logical impossibility to pay for everything that can be done, for everyone. Even now it's not uncommon to find individual patients who've had £2,000,000 spent on their care (small kid with leukaemia) or who needs arthritis drugs at £30,000 pa.
The basic NHS model of prividing medical care is a good one. As a doctor I always ask 'what needs to be done' for my patient. Not 'what can they afford'? I'm frrequently appalled by the unnecessary extra scans etc I see booked in the private system here, or the insurance 'gotchas' (e.g. patient breaks ankle; sent to NHS hospital. Insurance pays for operation in a private hospital but not for the ambulance transfer to it).
The problem with the NHS system isn't that it doesn't work. It's that at present it's being attacked for ideological reasons and that presently we're being forced to do too much with too little. An injection of money would help - and as we spend less than many comparable nations on healthcare it's odd to suggest that this is unaffordable. However at some point we're going to have to accept that we can't do everything for everyone at all times.
For the people on the bottom that physically work and produce nothing really changes. All that people really need is food and shelter and in the western world we can afford to eat a lot less. The people at the bottom already live paycheck to paycheck and they know how to do physical work and how to fix things themselves. The people that will be hurt are the infirm that our modern society supports which includes the elderly, chronically sick and cripples. Most of us will someday at some point join the infirm.
This is the scenario after a "worldwide bankruptcy" All the land with all the houses and apartments will still exist. All the farmland that produces all the food that overfeeds our country and the rest for the world will still exist. All the fertilizers, chemicals, and natural resources will still exist. At least two thirds of the people, working to produce and distribute the above, will continue doing what they already do. Many of the poorest people of today live in luxury compared to a hundred and two hundred years ago. What will change is the "rich" will be out on the street sort to speak with their bank accounts decimated. There will be a memorable backlash against lawyers, investment bankers, and politicians that support their rackets and games.
Medical patents will be vacated and health care will go back to being affordable. Doctors will be better protected legally and not need insurance like the do now but will be subject to more public records, reviews and audits. Medicine will go back to being affordable comparable to the 1960. There will be no million dollar procedures unless you have a million dollars. People will die at 85 instead of 90. Doctors pay checks will no longer be quite so big but they will no longer need to support the insurance industry and lawyers. They will become more respectable and esteemed members of society back when children wanted to grow up to be a doctor not because of the paycheck but rather to be a hero of society.
Higher education will become affordable again but no longer be government subsidized.
UK has been getting a flood of immigrants who want nothing more than to live on the UK's generous welfare system.
Sensible arguments are can be made from the right - about NHS, immigration and other stuff, but you wrote flaming nonsense.
No economic migrant anywhere in the world is a leech on the host. They are the most hardworking - generally doing the low wage work the locals are not really keen to do. They pay taxes - may be not income tax - but every other tax when they consume products and services.
Who's the famous immigrant bogeyman in UK? The Polish Plumber. Who's he? A plumber. Someone who unclogs the stupid shit you guys excrete.
This is the same all over the world. Mexicans and Central Americans in US, Bangladeshi's in India (before partition - 60 years back - Bangladesh and India was the same country, calling Bangladeshi's illegal immigrants is stretching matters, still India has 1 billion plus population - so at least in the short term the argument 'we do not need extra heads' may make sense), Sub Saharan Africans in Italy who perish in large numbers when their boats capsize and so on.
The countries taking immigrants - willingly or otherwise - have a brighter future. You need headcount. The native population is not going to procreate in the numbers needed to keep your economy growing and humming. US is a prime example. Japan is on a long term decline for precisely the same reason - they are so insular they have a great derogatory word for non Japanese - GAICHIN. Ask yourself - do you want to live in a Japanese society full of inbred Japanese who all look the same? Parsi's in India - otherwise a very sensible community - is in decline for the same reason. They are so insular if a Parsi marries a non Parsi they are kicked out.
What you - and the type like you - also forget is the cultural and social contribution of the immigrants. Diversity and mixing of gene pool is a good idea. It makes your country stronger.
The new slogan should be "make love to someone of your opposite in gene pool, not war."
Tat Tvam Asi
That's pretty misleading. More people die in hospitals in the UK because they can go to the hospitals for free. In the US, they're more likely to die at home, because they can't afford to go to the hospital.
But dead is dead, and the UK's life expectancy is better than America's, while spending less per capita on health care. No amount of spin can change that.
As a person who has lived in those countries, and in the US, the stories are greatly exaggerated by the republican side of the argument. In general, I would say I have been treated more promptly, and with less hassle in countries with socialised health care than in the US. The UK if anything has been best of all in this regard, as it involves absolutely no payment when you are treated, which takes a large chunk of stress out of the situation.
European countries created socialized healthcare after they had been devastated bu WWII. They had no money for it but they had the political will. Now that they produce more wealth than ever (France GDP gown 700% since 1945, while population only doubled, for instance), European countries have the money but no political will to move it to socialized healthcare instead of shareholders profits.
I've lived in three countries, the UK with a full free health service, New Zealand with a partially free health service, and the US, and I've had contact with all of those health services for myself or my family.
The NHS in the UK is the best all round. You see your doctor, you feel that they care about you, they have the backing of a good hospital system to do anything they need to do. It can be slow to get treatment, but you can always go private if you can afford to do so, but when I had problems they were fast enough.
The system in NZ is the second best. The doctors care, and there is a smaller population so it feels more intimate. However, that smaller population means less in the way of economy of scale, so treatment might not be available or you have to travel further. Pharmac negotiates drugs on a national level so that is good for the tax payer, but maybe not for the individual that requires an esoteric cancer treatment. As with the UK you can always go private if the public system is too slow, and I've had an occasion where that was the case.
I don't really know where to begin with the US system. On the positive side its nice and shiny. Individual people do care and help you out, but it doesn't feel like the system as a whole gives a shit. There is a lot of paperwork (absent from the previous examples). There is an abundance of choice and options. When you are sick (or your kid is sick) you don't want choice or options. I was shocked that the health coverage from my company was only subsidised and I still had to pay on top, and I'm utterly confused by the insurance options and savings whatnots (you put money into an account for health stuff?). It is a complex and scary system, but at least if it turns out I have the wrong coverage I can flee home to sanity.
I hope they keep the NHS free. Adding fees will ruin feel of it. I know what they'll do if they charge fees is they'll create a health card for low income people who can't afford the cost. But it is a needless barrier to treatment, if they do that why not just raise tax?
Oh no, no, no. ACA was passed on a party line vote. It was what the Democrats would support that was the limiting factor. As it was they passed it by hook or by crook, with plenty of pork bribes to key holdouts.
House Passes Historic Health Bill
The House gave final passage to the Senate's health legislation on a climactic 219-to-212 vote, as Democrats muscled the measure through on the strength of the party's big majority. In the final roll call, no House Republican voted for the bill, and 34 Democrats voted no, many of them representing Republican-leaning districts.
A short while later, the House, voting 220 to 211, approved a companion bill making changes to the Senate bill, a measure necessary to attract support in the House. Those changes now head to the Senate, where action is expected this week. All Republicans voted against the companion bill, as did 33 Democrats.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Long waits? When was the last time you went to visit your doctor in the US? I'm lucky if I can see him this week.
Same with the emergency room - unless you are bleeding all over the place chances are you'll be waiting for a couple hours.
My one scrape with socialized medicine was in Canada where they fixed a broken arm - put it in a cast. I don't remember waiting at all in the emergency room and to this day I haven't been billed.
just tax the rich more. Seriously. We put a _lot_ of effort to satisfying their whims and providing them with every creature comfort in the world. The only thing we'd lose is the (false) dream that we can have it ourselves. But then again good luck getting people to give that up...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Privatisation probably works reasonably well for discrete procedures such as hip replacements or cataract surgery, but holistic healthcare is another issue. Patients, particularly older patients, are starting to have more and more medical conditions simultaneously. All the doctors looking after all the separate conditions need to be able to communicate seamlessly and often need access to scans and results requested by other doctors. My experience of private healthcare is that it leaves a lot of 'gaps' in the care.
Sometimes these are literal - e.g. patient needs an operation in another hospital. Both providers refuse to pay for transport between the hospitals because they deny responsibility. At one point I worked in a hospital where porters refused to push patients through a tunnel to another hospital - both sides denied responsibility. It was left to the doctors to push the beds, because nobody else would break the impasse!
Another issue is training. At present, doctors trained on the NHS do private work. But without a public system, how do said doctors get trained? Training is expensive and for that matter increases risks to patients, no matter how much we would like to deny this. This makes private care look much better on paper, but would need to be solved prior to dismantling the NHS.
The UK's NHS has, for most of its life, been neither a single-payer nor an insurance based system ... instead its costs came out of general taxation with no treatment-accounting. By that I mean there was no financial record-keeping related to individual treatments or doctor consultations ..... Family doctors (GP) receive a flat annual sum for each patient they have registered, regardless of how many or how few times the patient visits them. Likewise Hospitals were funded based on the medical needs of the area, with no financial records kept of individual's treatment episodes.
this approach resulted in admin costs of about 5% of expenditure only
Tony Blair started the rot when his Labour government introduced the "internal market", forcing every medical episode to be recorded and costed.. The excuse being that hospitals would compete for patient-referals from family doctors ... as the NHS had gone through a phase when it relocated most district's hospital services onto single sites, most areas of the country have only a single hospital competing against itself. There was no medical advantage to this change BUT it introduced the financial recording system needed for future privatisation
The result was an explosion of admin and financial staff ..... and admin costs that reached 11% of expenditure..
the current government's reforms are predicted to push admin costs over 20% of expenditure.
The other aspect that the Tories hate is that it is paid for out of general taxation not through an insurance premium ... so the rich contribute more than the poor and the unemployed and the less affluent pensioners still receive health-care. with the original funding method, most people paid far less in their taxes for healthcare than in insurance systems such as the US.
In general there are no medical co-pays as in the US ... Drugs are free BUT, unless are exempt (over 60, under 16, etc) you pay $10 for the prescription ... there are small co-pays for a few services such as dentistry and glasses .... things like hearing aids, breathing equipment etc, are provided free .... the NHS used to be the worlds biggest manufacturer of hearing-aids, false-teeth, glasses and artificial limbs ...
Wow, I knew the UK was becoming more like the US every year, but I had no idea how much. Maybe this is Margaret Thatcher reaching out from beyond the grave to dismantle the remaining state institutions?
Nobody seems to understand that healthcare (a) has to be treated like a public good (in the economic sense) to be fairly available to everyone, and (b) that requires rationing of care to keep costs reasonable. The ACA we have now does neither of these -- it was a compromise to keep the "free market" insurance companies in on the game while giving them millions more customers.
If I were king, I would just declare Medicare to be the default universal insurance plan for everyone. That's a good compromise, since it doesn't cover everything and the insurance companies could fight over that market. It does cover catastrophic things, which is the primary failing of our system now. No one thinks the insurance companies would ever deny their claims, but they should try getting very sick sometime and see how fast the friendly relationship changes. People's taxes would go up, but they would be getting a valuable benefit for it.
The other thing single-payer care could eliminate is the tying of insurance coverage to employment. I personally know a few people whose families have serious health problems and they're literally trapped at their current employer because of the insurance plan they offer.
I think the ACA will reduce cost by a little bit, but it has flaws:
- You're still dealing with for-profit insurance companies who are looking for every reason to not cover a claim -- I doubt customer service will improve.
- The uninsured population that qualifies for subsidies isn't necessarily going to know or care about their ability to get cheap or free health insurance. It's not nice to say that people are stupid, but they are...
- Same goes for the policies themselves. Even educated people are confused by the language in health insurance policies and it's only gotten more complex with high-deductible plans, MSAs, etc.
- People who have insurance through work are just going to grumble about their rates going up and get no immediate benefit. Almost everyone vilifying single-payer healthcare has steady, well paying jobs and has never had to worry about going bankrupt if they land in the hospital. Because they don't understand the target population (low income workers with crappy or no insurance from their low-level service job) they think there's no benefit.
- The current political climate in the US labels anything beneficial that the government provides as socialism and therefore evil.
I think we should ditch the whole thing and just go single-payer. Doctors would get paid fee-for-service and not have to deal with insurance companies, individuals would be able to use healthcare without worrying about the cost, and things would be better. There's no reason a country like ours with so much wealth can't provide universal healthcare. People complain about government inefficiency, but what's efficient about tons of for profit insurance companies nickel and diming their policyholders and healthcare providers in order to make a buck? I think government would be very efficient at this task (and the NHS is -- the UK has a higher life expectancy than we do and spends less.)
Privatisation probably works reasonably well for discrete procedures such as hip replacements or cataract surgery, but holistic healthcare is another issue.
It depends on what you mean by "privatization". From the articles the GP linked, the changes the Tories have been making don't create what you'd consider a "private health sytem" - that is, one where the end-user pays. Instead, they're restructuring the NHS model so that instead of the government running the program directly, they hire private medical contractors to perform the same task. This means they can hire multiple providers (generally in different regions), evaluate them against each other, encourage competition between them to lower prices, etc. It's a change to how services are provisioned, not to how they're paid, or to what services are offered.
Another issue is training. At present, doctors trained on the NHS do private work. But without a public system, how do said doctors get trained?
Firstly, despite the changes their proposing, the NHS would still be a public system (that is, funded by the public, and serving public clients). Leaving that aside, if there's no public system, then obviously doctor's would train in the private system. I mean, you don't think there was no medical training before the establishment of publicly-funded medical systems do you? The US has only just implemented a public system, and they've managed to train doctors for quite some time.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
"Like Canada where the government is laying off doctors and nurses and people are starting to get private insurance because the government isn't covering everything?"
Cite your sources for this FUD.
Signed, a Canadian who has not seen any of this.
Actually, if you follow international news at all, there has been a strong Conservative/Tory assault on the NHS for several years now.
If you follow the news you realize that Labour might have some involvement since they ran the government for so long.
Labour must bear the blame for the shameful decline of the NHS
Up to 1,200 needless deaths, patients abused, staff bullied to meet targets... yet a secret inquiry into failing hospital says no one's to blame
- Up to 1,200 patients died unnecessarily because of appalling care
- Labour's obsession with targets and box ticking blamed for scandal
- Patients were 'routinely neglected' at hospital
- Report calls for FOURTH investigation into scandal
I'm sure there is plenty more to find.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Do you jerk off while spreading fud?
Iceland isn't bankrupt, they unlike everyone else, took the healthy choice of defaulting on their loans, restructured and recovered. They are actually fairing better than pretty much anyone else right now.
Why would France want to cover (illegal)immigrants (guess you left that out for your fud)? No-one else are doing so.
Greece is going bankrupt for wholly different things, it's not their public health care that are destroying them.
Sorry, but you are confused. Progressive lobbyists helped the Democrats write that bill. Republicans had nothing to do with it.
Center For American Progress* President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"
* Not at all a Republican think tank.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Long waits? When was the last time you went to visit your doctor in the US? I'm lucky if I can see him this week.
Same with the emergency room - unless you are bleeding all over the place chances are you'll be waiting for a couple hours.
My one scrape with socialized medicine was in Canada where they fixed a broken arm - put it in a cast. I don't remember waiting at all in the emergency room and to this day I haven't been billed.
Well let me reply since I'm from Canada, the last time I needed a doctor visit, it was a 3 week wait. My sister in Alberta has to wait for a doctor to come to her town. Once per month, from another city 6 hours away. When I goto see my neurologist, I get appointments for either 1 month or 3 months depending. If I have to cancel, it's a min. of 35 days for the next. I have to travel 1.4 hours to see her, there's no one closer. My sister drives 7 hours to go see her diabetic specialist. Once every 3 months.
If I goto the emergency room, and it's serious I'm in right away...most of the time. If not, I'll be waiting. Oh and for some people, the emergency room is their family doctor in Canada. When I had testicular torsion I was in, in a flash. When I got a metal sliver in my eye, it was a 9 hour wait.
And generally if you're "visiting" you don't get billed unless it's expensive. A broken arm isn't considered much of anything to bill, or didn't use to be. But in Ontario, you're likely to be billed now since we've had decades of Americans coming across the border and using our healthcare.
Om, nomnomnom...
I like how to just take all the bullshit and swallow like a cum hungry crack whore.
Non of those statements is actually true, but it fits you bias so you spew it out.
The NHS Confederation is not part of the NHS. They are a group that seems to get a boner thinking poor people with go without medical aid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's still way cheaper that *public* healthcare in the US alone (medicare and medicaid), let alone the full costs of US healthcare, which are astronomical in comparison, but funding has been massively cut the last few years in real terms.
The conservatives have strangled funding for the NHS deliberately for ideological reasons, while funding several expensive wars abroad, because they want to undermine it and then get rid of it piecemeal, as they did with dentistry in the 80s. This sort of story is the precursor to farming out care contracts to private companies, not because it's cheaper, but because of their belief in the free market and connections between the Conservative ministers and private industry, here are some of our recent health secretaries:
Andrew Lansley - bankrolled by a private healthcare company.
Jeremy Hunt - in his previous role had deep connections with the Murdoch companies he regulated.
Something that can't go on forever, won't.
You cannot possibly tax enough to pay for offering something for free to everyone where a significant percentage of people will abuse the privilege.
Some free heath care systems work because of cultural insularity, but that will not last forever either without sacrifices...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shorter version: they should pay more money for worse care. Other options, like hiking taxes on the rich or slashing military spending to create more revenue, would just be hippie nonsense.
Publicly they've claimed to want to maintain the NHS, but every single policy has been towards further privatisation, with the ultimate goal being that people "pay their own dues". They are the closest thing you'll find in Britain to the Republicans, but they know they wouldn't get elected if they publicly admitted to this, so they lied and a lot of people have been fooled.
That said. Norway's national health service (and I've just moved back here) is not free at the point of service. Everyone pays approximately $30 per GP consultation and something like $50-100 for a specialist appointment. Unless you're a child (in which case everything is free) or get a "free card" or if it is an emergency (in which case I've never heard anyone get charged).
A free card you get either for being unemployed, on benefits, or if you simply have alread spent more than about $300 on medical bills that year. So a few hundred dollars is the most anyone will spend on health care appointments in a year.
I find this to be a reasonable compromise and it does stop a lot of people from going to their GP "frivolously" and will thus save the health service a considerable amount of money. My only concern is that patients aren't necessarily the greatest judge of what is "frivolous". Men, in particularly, can take a long time going to the GP because they're sure "it's nothing". I'd hate for genuinely ill people to not turn up to the GP because they don't want to waste $30.
I can see my (NHS) doctor within 24 hours too, in usual circumstances. And on the off chance that's not possible, or I need to see a doctor today (even though it isn't emergency- let's say it's the day before I go on holiday or something) there's a walk-in GP surgery which takes people on a first-come-first serve basis and is usually available within a couple of hours without an appointment.
Last time I had a medical emergency, an ambulance picked me up within 10 minutes, whisked me through A&E without stopping, and I was operated on within a few hours. Last time I had a less serious emergency (a broken arm), I don't think I waited more than an hour total at the hospital, including all stages added together.
I'm guessing that that's just about as good a service as anyone in the world gets.
Why ever could that be?
What do you think that graph shows?
Here's what it seems to show. Between 1997 and 2008- the entire Labour term in office before the financial crash- debt dropped to 40% of GDP. This coincides with the highest increase in NHS spending in recent history. Now I'm not trying to argue a causal link- but it clearly wasn't NHS spending which caused our government debt. It spiked in 2008, which correlates with the huge government spending to nationalise and otherwise prop up financial service providers- not spending on a single other thing.
The chart goes on to show that since 2010, the debt to GDP ratio has continued to go up at a faster rate than at any time before the financial crisis. This coincides with the harshest cuts to NHS spending in recent history. So clearly cutting NHS funding hasn't made much of a difference to our government debt either.
Arguing that cutting spending on the NHS or welfare is going to make the blindest bit of difference either way is disingenuous. The only reason the Tories are cutting spending on the NHS is because they always want to cut spending on the NHS, in all circumstances. It's just their basic political modus operandi.
Sorry, but you are confused. Progressive lobbyists helped the Democrats write that bill. Republicans had nothing to do with it. (Are you going to call the President of the Center For American Progress* (a fellow "progressive") a liar when she claims credit for her work?
Center For American Progress* President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"
In any event there were substantial practical differences between the two plans. The policy from Heritage was never an unqualified mandate.
For the benefit of any other readers, here is the article he finds so objectionable: ObamaCare's Heritage . Here is the Amicus brief Heritage filed with the Appeals Court explaining its position.
I will also note you've really only disagreed with me, not "debunked" my position. That would be difficult for you to do since I'm simply relying on the facts. But please, disagree with the Center for American Progress*. They need more opposition.
* Not at all either a Republican or conservative think tank.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yes... Just fine. Those stories of long waits, or unavailable diagnostic care are just rumors, I am sure...
Yes, they are.
Believe me,I lived for 7 years in UK and now I'm in my 6th year in USA and it is incomparable. US system is just massively inferior - and I work for a big national lab and hold the most expensive insurance option.
So yes, I'd go back to NHS any moment.
You hear wrongly.
http://euobserver.com/social/121778
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10361971/Britain-admits-it-has-no-figures-on-EU-welfare-tourist-numbers.html
Unproductive immigrants are largely a myth. People who can work themselves up enough to emigrate are not usually the sort of people to shy away from work. Statistically, an immigrant is more likely to be in work than a UK native, and is likely to make greater net payments to the state (paying taxes versus using government services) than a native.
Immigration is a knee-jerk right-wing bugbear. You can argue, if you like, that they're taking our jobs. But you can't also argue that they're all work-shy scroungers. Can't both be true.
One patient on one day, did you take time to read the whole article?
Not particularly great but not as terrible as the headline would like to suggest.
And just for a little context, UK NHS A&E now handles around 21.7 million cases a year.
France arguing over immigrants suggests that not restricting immigrants could lead to a failure. Guess what? The US system allows non-legal immigrants unrestricted access even for non-life-threatening treatment.
Back during the initial "debate" on Obamacare, Wisconsin Public Radio had the minister responsible for Finland's health care system on as a guest to explain how it would solve all of our problems. You could hear the host (an ardent liberal) gasp when the minister suggested that the Finnish system would fail miserably in the US because the Finnish system does not cover tourists nor illegal (undocumented) immigrant. He pointed out that non-residents are required to show proof of insurance or purchase insurance upon entry and they are then entered into the system. He said that treatment does not happen if you are not in the system. I'm fairly certain that he was talking about non-life threatening treatment because he did state that simple broken bones would not be handled without being in the system.
The direct quote in the summary talks about doubts over
The title says
The person who transformed the first into the second has serious problems with either English or logic. "We may have to charge some patients" isn't the same as "We may have to charge all patients".
Your reference to "discontinuing free care" is ambiguous, but without qualifiers is easier to interpret along the lines of the title rather than of reality.
I had to resort to US health care only once so far. Compared to other medical services I had to use (though I should admit that so far at least I only needed medical services in parts of the "western world"), the US service is by some margin the worst, and generally just something I'd have considered possible in some third world country. Sure, the whole thing looks nice, building those houses sure must have been expensive, but when you look at the inside and see people who drop blood on the floor sitting next to you waiting for a doc instead of being rushed to some emergency room, you know something is simply running very, very WRONG.
Thinking that I'd have to PAY for that kind of "service" if I didn't have my insurance just boggles the mind.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ah, the chutzpa of the American winger. Call bullshit, then spout off a bunch of nonsense that's nothing but bullshit.
Bullshit. If that were the case, you'd be rattling off how this single payer country doesn't cover cancer treatments, and that one doesn't cover organ transplants. You don't because you can't.
Bullshit. They only have to get you healthy long enough to get out the door. And their bill collectors will hound you as long as they are legally allowed to and quite possibly past that as well.
Which Democrats are those? Certainly not the ones in the White House or in Congress, since they are the right wingers who first killed the possibility of single payer, then traded away the public option to the hospital lobby, and finally passed the Heritage Foundation plan/Romneycare.
The right-wing party hate the NHS because it represents a large slice of the economic pie that their buddies in industry want to get their fork into. They don't care that it's one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world with excellent outcomes.
The left-wing party just fucked things up by being corrupt and not having the balls to bring the contracts started by the right-wing party to an end.
The biggest crisis facing the NHS is the Public Private Partnership scheme - in which big private companies get the contract to build hospitals and other medical facilities AND a sweetheart contract to run them for 30 years, which typically runs the total cost of ownership up to around 300% of what it actually would have cost.
That was probably the killer blow - you now have hospital trusts struggling to make their buildings payments and keep their clinical services functioning at the same time, which enables the politicians to step in and say "Look, this hospital is struggling! The only thing that can save it is the Invisible Hand of the Market!" ... with no actual coherent explanation of how a private company which by definition will take their cut off the top, can provide a better service than a public institution that has had years of practice at running an operation on a shoestring budget, having had their income cut to the bone so many times that their bones are now rather thin.
The Invisible Hand of the Market of course just wants to reach up the patient's backside and pull the gold fillings out of their back teeth. They don't care about the risky, expensive, uncommon, and difficult procedures, they care about the assembly-line procedures and services that have predictable consumption rates and costs, like hip replacements, haemorrhoids, etc, which they can monetize nicely, ignoring the fact that that surplus on these procedures is what paid for the difficult stuff, like open heart surgery that saves the lives of babies with congenital defects.
The destruction of the NHS is just outright evil, because it will result in less healthcare (because doing less and charging more makes more money), at a greater cost (when the NHS struggles, the private company is brought in. When the private company struggles, it will be bailed out), for less of the people that need it (the lower social demographics require NHS services disproportionately more and are less likely to be able to stump up the co-pay), all to line the pockets of a few Conservative party donors. Doing bad unto others for your own benefit or amusement being the definition of evil.
There's not such thing as the British NHS in terms of one large health service - there are 4. Healthcare delivered free at point of use was instigated across the whole of the UK in 1946, but the NHS in Scotland and Northern Ireland has always been decentralised with responsibility being with the Scottish Office and Northern Irish government as they were at the time. The Welsh Secretary of State took responsibility for the NHS there in 1969. Nowadays, the Westminster (UK) department of health is only responsible for England. Healthcare (along with many other matters such as justice/policing) is looked after independently by the Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly, with the Welsh Senead also governing this (though with fewer other powers than the other two legislatures, which both have their own legal jurisdictions). So whenever reports of privatisation appear, they're normally specific to England, because it's only there that the Tories can carry out their ideological assault on the welfare state so directly.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
I woke up with a hard pain in my right side. It got worse and worse, until it was clear it wasn't cramp, but something badly wrong.
I called an ambulance. I live in a rural area, so an hour away from the nearest hospital. Ambulance was there in 10 minutes. They assessed me, took me to hospital.
After blood tests, they put me on high dose antibiotics and painkillers, and onto the ward. They suspected a gallstone. A few hours later, I had an ultrasound; no sign of a gallstone, but the gallbladder was clearly inflamed and I had an infection. They decided to see if the antibiotics would tackle the infection, so I could have elective surgery more safely in a couple of weeks to remove the gallbladder.
I got worse over night, with a worsening fever. They booked me in for emergency surgery to investigate, and I was going under anaesthetic inside an hour. Turns out, my gallbladder had turned necrotic and had started to fall apart, and needed removing in a hurry - they had to switch from keyhole to open surgery, took it out on the spot.
I then spent a week in the hospital, recovering from the 6" abdominal hole from the surgery. When I was discharged, my total bill was... £0.
I was treated with huge professionalism and care, survived what could easily have been a fatal infection with rapid treatment, and I didn't spend a second worrying about what it would cost me. Ok, the food was airline quality, but I wasn't exactly hungry anyway.
The NHS is running out of money because there's more people, living longer, wanting the latest, best drugs that cost more, while funding levels are being cut in real terms by the Tory government. That's something that will have to be dealt with, but it's certainly not a reason to kill the NHS. It's one the best things about Britain, and if we have to up our contributions a few percent to pay for it, I for one am glad to do so.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Competitive tenders tend to lead to buying services off ATOS and their ilk. And their professionalism and competence is in constant question. I always wondered how these outsourcing agencies still are not barred from the process.
The lowest bidder is propably not what you want.
This outsourcing nonesense has had none of the predicted benefits. Overall costs have not gone down and professionalism has not gone up. It's more of the same with a larger overhead since the outsourcing agency has a beureaucratic overhead as well as the public agency and their respective law departments. To keep the cost roughly the same the people who actually do the work get pathetic wages that in no way shape or form echo their value in the whole system.
20 minutes into the future
Up to 1,200 needless deaths, patients abused, staff bullied to meet targets... yet a secret inquiry into failing hospital says no one's to blame [dailymail.co.uk]
Yeah, I'm not saying that there's no some truth in there, but I'd want to get the story from a more trustworthy source than the blatantly partisan, fact-skewing, lying-by-omission, wouldn't-trust-them-as-far-as-I-could-throw-them Daily Mail.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
With respect to the UK (not England, England is not the UK, just as the USA is not America): "Can't afford it" is an interesting question.
Is it rather a case of "what the government chooses to spend its money on"?
I am reminded of the quality of life in Costa Rica opposed to its neighbours: Costa Rica decided to abolish its army in 1949 and spends the money on education and health instead; it has a high level of literacy and has 'health tourists' who visit from the USA. Perhaps the issue of cost is around what you decide to spend your money on.
I am not sure Iceland went bankrupt? I think it nearly did, but the problem was that the government decided not to bail out the banks. I believe the country is doing rather well these days.
The NHS works at base cost, how can base cost + profit margin be a cheaper alternative and more sustainable?
Because there is no such thing as "base cost", there is just "cost". What the NHS considers "cost" can still be more than what the alternative calls "cost + profit margin".
Shorter version: if you can't afford to pay, go die quietly in the street like the good little serf that you are. It's your fucking fault your last name isn't Walton, or that you
If Britain is like the U.S., and their advertized war budget is half of what it actually is, the U.K. could slash their own war spending, pay for the entire UHS budget and still be one of the more heavily armed countries on the planet.
Shorter version: the usual "job creator" bullshit. Rich people don't create jobs. Demand does. Funny how working stiffs have to work hard at crappy jobs even though they pay crappy money, but we just couldn't find CEO's to do the job unless they make in one year what would take their employees hundreds of years to earn.
What happens if we taxed the richest people at Eisenhower tax rates? They'd still be the richest people in the country!
FWIW I work for the NHS. The Labour governement indeed poured billions into the health service during their term but it was almost totally squandered on failed IT projects, an army of midde-managers, non-jobs and grossly overpaid execs.Very little of it was invested in actual patient care.
I do believe the Tories are genuinely trying to fix it, my problem with them is that they're doing their usual carpet-bombing approach instead of carefully targetting the gross inefficiencies that are blighting the NHS.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Yes... Just fine. Those stories of long waits, or unavailable diagnostic care are just rumors, I am sure...
Yes, they are.
Well, actually they aren't. Looking at both Britain and Canada, both the media and government have reported problems with waiting times. It isn't a new problem, and it both can and does impact patient care. Perhaps you haven't experienced it as a problem, or maybe you have and are accustomed to it, or maybe even pride in the system won't allow you to admit it, but it exists.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yes, they are. By and large, all of those stories ARE just rumours.
Canadians aren't exactly clamouring to emulate the US system. The Canadian woman that appeared in Republican commercials trying to smear our system had a non-threatening disorder that she felt was more serious than it actually was. She wasn't being refused care because we didn't have the capacity, she was being put on a waiting list because she could afford to wait while other people that had more threatening problems were triaged up the chain first.
We have waiting lists, yes. There are times where the system fails, yes. These are problems that every system tries to work out. But people here get care, and they get it without going bankrupt. The best case scenario in the Canadian system is that you get timely care with minimal cost. The average case is probably that you got reasonably timely care with a bit of wait, but still at minimum cost. Putting aside the worst case scenarios of death or misdiagnosis which are endemic in any system that involves humans--including the American system--you may have to wait a long time for care, but you're STILL not on the hook for any costs.
Many of the best case scenarios in the USA seem to leave middle class people with great care but crippling bills. The rich get off scott free, the poor simply don't get any care at all (or emergency room care, which is too little, too late, for too much).
I can understand not necessarily wanting the Canadian system. There are actually plenty of examples of even better systems in the world. But the fact remains that Canadian outcomes and costs are, objectively, better at lower cost. Life expectancy is higher here, infant mortality is lower.
But the current American system? A failed experiment. Try something else.
Actually, no, the stories are absolutely correct. They just fail to mention that this is the story when you have essentially unlimited amount of money to spend on healthcare. Then you get top notch care with no waits etc in US, and compared to that, regular NHS service might not look so good. But, of course, this is comparing apples to oranges - people can get private insurance with better service in UK, as well, and most Brits who can't afford it and stick to NHS are served much better than most Americans who get screwed by insurance plans for the common prole.