SunshineGirl · 36-40, F
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MartinII · 70-79, M
@SunshineGirl Western European countries are more appropriate comparators. Anyway, you need to look at historic trends, metrics for treatment of particular conditions, demographic differences etc. As it happens, someone has just posted that Italy has the highest life expectancy in Europe.
SunshineGirl · 36-40, F
@MartinII Indeed, but I'm not sure the OP will be particularly receptive to detailed statistical analysis. He posted a simplified statement, I responded proportionately.
ArishMell · 70-79, M
What is that as a proportion of the country's entire turn-over or running-costs (all the other public services, etc.)?
What is the alternative to a national health service, though?
A fully commercial service?
That makes everyone a commodity for greedy insurers and stock-market dealers whose profits are far more important than anyone's health, and if the owners are foreign that money is lost to the nation*.
With a commercial system, if you cannot afford treatment fees, or insurance premiums with all their limits, restrictions and claw-backs, tough: don't fall ill or off a ladder. Many people could simply not afford it - I'd be half-crippled by now, with arthritis - and that is why the NHS in the UK, and similar in many other countries, were established.
Aneurin Bevan MP (Lab.) modelled the National Health Service on mutual-insurance rather than commercial-insurance plans he examined among the lowly-paid communities in his South Wales, coal-mining constituency. He saw the suffering of those who could not afford proper general health-care, alleviated to some extent by these mutual-aid associations helping pay the doctors' fees. This in an area in which wages were low; most industrial work was hard, very unpleasant and dangerous; industrial diseases and malnutrition, even major diseases like poliomyelitis, were common.
Mr. Bevan originally wanted NHS use all totally "free", but his own Labour government soon recognised that would be unaffordable. Hence the contributions we pay towards optician's and dentists' treatments, and up to age 60, prescription medicines, even though still as NHS patients.
Some accuse the NHS of being over-managed, but apparently it isn't, even having a lower ratio of administrators to other staff than many major companies.
Nevertheless I wonder if it is too complicated, with all these "NHS Trusts", a hangover from the "internal market" days invented by Nigel Lawson MO (Cons.) as an adroit block on Prime-Minister Margaret Thatcher's ideas about privatising it.
Though successive governments of both parties have been stealthily hiving off services to contractors, or creating wholly-owned "companies" to employ the hospital support-staff. At one end of the scale, ear-wax removal is no longer a health-centre's nurse-practioner's procedure: a few months ago it cost me £70 for 15 minutes' treatment in a chain-optician's/audiologist's shop (Specsavers, I think). That rate, £280 / hour and using almost no consumable materials, is very steep for any business. As an example at the other end, a resident of Yeovil recently told me a major extension to his local hospital is for a cancer-treatment block to be run by a contractor. As an NHS hospital patient, the tax-payer will foot the treatment bill, but now with a profit element added to the invoice to the NHS.
Previously, as I remember, you could as now buy private treatment if rich enough; but otherwise all health-care was all-NHS, and the NHS was run as a federation of regional health-authorities. It worked then, could it work again - simplifying the service without needing big cuts in services and staff?
........
*This national loss of money does happen of course, with care-homes, because they are not NHS or local-authority run, and many are foreign-owned.
What is the alternative to a national health service, though?
A fully commercial service?
That makes everyone a commodity for greedy insurers and stock-market dealers whose profits are far more important than anyone's health, and if the owners are foreign that money is lost to the nation*.
With a commercial system, if you cannot afford treatment fees, or insurance premiums with all their limits, restrictions and claw-backs, tough: don't fall ill or off a ladder. Many people could simply not afford it - I'd be half-crippled by now, with arthritis - and that is why the NHS in the UK, and similar in many other countries, were established.
Aneurin Bevan MP (Lab.) modelled the National Health Service on mutual-insurance rather than commercial-insurance plans he examined among the lowly-paid communities in his South Wales, coal-mining constituency. He saw the suffering of those who could not afford proper general health-care, alleviated to some extent by these mutual-aid associations helping pay the doctors' fees. This in an area in which wages were low; most industrial work was hard, very unpleasant and dangerous; industrial diseases and malnutrition, even major diseases like poliomyelitis, were common.
Mr. Bevan originally wanted NHS use all totally "free", but his own Labour government soon recognised that would be unaffordable. Hence the contributions we pay towards optician's and dentists' treatments, and up to age 60, prescription medicines, even though still as NHS patients.
Some accuse the NHS of being over-managed, but apparently it isn't, even having a lower ratio of administrators to other staff than many major companies.
Nevertheless I wonder if it is too complicated, with all these "NHS Trusts", a hangover from the "internal market" days invented by Nigel Lawson MO (Cons.) as an adroit block on Prime-Minister Margaret Thatcher's ideas about privatising it.
Though successive governments of both parties have been stealthily hiving off services to contractors, or creating wholly-owned "companies" to employ the hospital support-staff. At one end of the scale, ear-wax removal is no longer a health-centre's nurse-practioner's procedure: a few months ago it cost me £70 for 15 minutes' treatment in a chain-optician's/audiologist's shop (Specsavers, I think). That rate, £280 / hour and using almost no consumable materials, is very steep for any business. As an example at the other end, a resident of Yeovil recently told me a major extension to his local hospital is for a cancer-treatment block to be run by a contractor. As an NHS hospital patient, the tax-payer will foot the treatment bill, but now with a profit element added to the invoice to the NHS.
Previously, as I remember, you could as now buy private treatment if rich enough; but otherwise all health-care was all-NHS, and the NHS was run as a federation of regional health-authorities. It worked then, could it work again - simplifying the service without needing big cuts in services and staff?
........
*This national loss of money does happen of course, with care-homes, because they are not NHS or local-authority run, and many are foreign-owned.
CountScrofula · 41-45, M
So what are you proposing?
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