Has Boris gone yet?

Here's quick overview of the latest round of privatisation.

The role of the private sector in carrying out operations on behalf of NHS England is well established. Labour’s health spokesman, Wes Streeting, has said he would use private firms to reduce waiting lists. Outsourcing also happens in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, although to a lesser extent. But by forcing NHS England to continue to rely on private sector backup, while refusing to commit to long-term workforce planning as advocated by the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, among others, the government is deliberately expanding the role of the market.
Click to expand...

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...view-on-nhs-privatisation-the-wrong-treatment

It's not accidental.
 
Garrison said:
Only to Daily Mail readers and US Republicans. The truth is that the current situation can entirely be traced back to deliberate government decisions, it mysteriously functioned better under governments that actually placed some value on it.
Click to expand...
It's basic queuing theory. Success in medicine leads to an older and older population, carrying more and more chronic conditions, that requires more and more treatment to keep it alive. More and more conditions that you would have dropped dead of quickly and cheaply become treatable, at an ever increasing cost. You see that in the cost of the NHS approximately trebled as a % of GDP over the decades. Demand for treatment necessarily exceeds the money to pay for it. You get around that in a "free at the point of need" system by queuing and/or by restricting what treatments are offered. The more successful the system in keeping people alive, the longer the queues and the more treatments have to be withheld for cost reasons.

There is a tendency to want the NHS to be efficient, and hail that as a good thing. An efficient system, in terms of maintaining high utilisation of resources in the system, that has varying demand for a wide array of different services, is necessarily a system based on queuing. It is necessarily a system continually on the verge of collapse since, any spare capacity represents patients that could have been treated, but weren't. Queues are a feature, not a bug.

We could spend 100% of our GDP on the NHS and, in time, that would create an even older population, with even more challenging chronic conditions, and we'd find that demand still outstripped the budget.
 
shuttlt said:
It's basic queuing theory. Success in medicine leads to an older and older population, carrying more and more chronic conditions, that requires more and more treatment to keep it alive. More and more conditions that you would have dropped dead of quickly and cheaply become treatable, at an ever increasing cost. You see that in the cost of the NHS approximately trebled as a % of GDP over the decades. Demand for treatment necessarily exceeds the money to pay for it. You get around that in a "free at the point of need" system by queuing and/or by restricting what treatments are offered. The more successful the system in keeping people alive, the longer the queues and the more treatments have to be withheld for cost reasons.

There is a tendency to want the NHS to be efficient, and hail that as a good thing. An efficient system, in terms of maintaining high utilisation of resources in the system, that has varying demand for a wide array of different services, is necessarily a system based on queuing. It is necessarily a system continually on the verge of collapse since, any spare capacity represents patients that could have been treated, but weren't. Queues are a feature, not a bug.

We could spend 100% of our GDP on the NHS and, in time, that would create an even older population, with even more challenging chronic conditions, and we'd find that demand still outstripped the budget.
Click to expand...

How is that different to any other health system?
 
jimbob said:
Check out my signature:



The UK system is pretty cash-efficient.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure that a graph of money spent tells you whether money is being spent efficiently. Supposing it does make sense for the US to spend 13% of it's GDP on healthcare, that doesn't mean it makes sense for another country to do so.

Wikipedia claims that the US spent $11,072 per person, per year on health, while the UK spent $4,653.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita

To match US spending, the UK would have to increase health spending by about x2.4. That would take us past 20% of GDP. What different countries can afford to spend, or want to spend is different.
 
Darat said:
How is that different to any other health system?
Click to expand...
Garrison is the person you should argue this with. They says this is something only believed by "Daily Mail readers and US Republicans".
 
shuttlt said:
Garrison is the person you should argue this with. They says this is something only believed by "Daily Mail readers and US Republicans".
Click to expand...

I'm not arguing about anything - I am asking the person who made a post to address a question their post brought up.
 
Darat said:
I'm not arguing about anything - I am asking the person who made a post to address a question their post brought up.
Click to expand...
As I said in my post, it applies to "free at the point of need" healthcare.
 
shuttlt said:
Wikipedia claims that the US spent $11,072 per person, per year on health, while the UK spent $4,653.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita

To match US spending, the UK would have to increase health spending by about x2.4. That would take us past 20% of GDP. What different countries can afford to spend, or want to spend is different.
Click to expand...

Could this be because the US system is primarily insurance based, leading to higher charges for the same treatment? We've probably all seen stories where a US health provider charges $10 for a single over-the-counter painkiller tablet when the cost to the patient and provider in the UK is a few pennies at most.

Basically you seem to be comparing apples to oranges when you just quote %age of GDP spent on health care.

Meanwhile, in the UK :

"A nurse has been filmed warning patients at an overcrowded A&E department that they could be forced to wait up to 13 hours to see a doctor.

The nurse can be heard telling people in the waiting room that there are already 170 patients in the department, with 90 more patients waiting to be seen at the time.

She tells the crowded room: “Our current wait time for a doctor is seven-and-a-half hours. I will estimate by the time I go home in the morning at 8 o’clock some of you will still be here waiting for a doctor because the waits will get up to 12 or 13 hours."

full story here

This didn't use to happen. The NHS is underfunded, NHS pay hasn't even kept up with inflation and staff are exhausted, demoralised and leaving in droves.

From the same article:

"It was revealed last week that the NHS has lost almost 25,000 beds across the UK in the past decade."

Meanwhile, government claims to be "building 40 new hospitals" is a lie. Most of these projects are new wings, refurbishments and the like.
 
Darat said:
And as I asked how is that different from any other kind of health system?
Click to expand...
Darat, this is just the standard argument about why you had queues and long waiting lists for things in the Soviet Union that you could just go out and buy in the US. I know you know this. Typically most places have some kind of mixed system.
 
GlennB said:
Could this be because the US system is primarily insurance based, leading to higher charges for the same treatment? We've probably all seen stories where a US health provider charges $10 for a single over-the-counter painkiller tablet when the cost to the patient and provider in the UK is a few pennies at most.
Click to expand...
An insurance based system is completely different. You don't have the drive to utilise resources at 100% capacity, since market forces impose costs on having multi-year wait times for services that don't apply in a system like the NHS.

GlennB said:
Basically you seem to be comparing apples to oranges when you just quote %age of GDP spent on health care.
Click to expand...
I'm responding to claims that the NHS is underfunded and trying to get an explanation of what this means. Again, any level of funding, if you want the system to efficiently utilise resources in the system, will produce long queues.

GlennB said:
Meanwhile, in the UK :

"A nurse has been filmed warning patients at an overcrowded A&E department that they could be forced to wait up to 13 hours to see a doctor.

The nurse can be heard telling people in the waiting room that there are already 170 patients in the department, with 90 more patients waiting to be seen at the time.

She tells the crowded room: “Our current wait time for a doctor is seven-and-a-half hours. I will estimate by the time I go home in the morning at 8 o’clock some of you will still be here waiting for a doctor because the waits will get up to 12 or 13 hours."

full story here

This didn't use to happen. The NHS is underfunded, NHS pay hasn't even kept up with inflation and staff are exhausted, demoralised and leaving in droves.
Click to expand...
Right. The issue in this story is not the amount of funding. It is necessarily the case that demand for free healthcare outstrips supply. The issue is the desire to treat as many people as possible for as many things as possible. More money will allow a few more people to be treated in an environment where nurses are over stressed, and there are long queues. If you want that to change, then reducing stress, increasing pay and shortening queues has to be viewed as more important than treating as many people as possible.

GlennB said:
From the same article:

"It was revealed last week that the NHS has lost almost 25,000 beds across the UK in the past decade."

Meanwhile, government claims to be "building 40 new hospitals" is a lie. Most of these projects are new wings, refurbishments and the like.
Click to expand...
It won't make any long term difference. More money for nurses is always money that could have been spent on treating more patients for more things. If we want a non-stressed NHS that doesn't have crazy queues, we need to prioritise that over treating the maximum number of people.
 
Last edited:
Cosmic Yak said:
This is a politics thread. All I have to do is say you're wrong, and my job is done. Don't expect me to debate details or provide evidence. No-one else does, so why should I?
Click to expand...

Darat said:
:confused:
Click to expand...

Look back over this thread, and the General UK Politics thread, and see how many unevidenced assertions there are. These assertions are allowed to pass unchallenged because they fit the general echo-chamber nature of these threads.
You might also ask yourself why you have twice furnished evidence for other posters, rather than asking them to support their own claims, and consider whether you do this as a general rule, or just because they are on the same side of the political fence as you. This convenient abandonment of scepticism just reinforces confirmation bias.
 
Cosmic Yak said:
Look back over this thread, and the General UK Politics thread, and see how many unevidenced assertions there are. These assertions are allowed to pass unchallenged because they fit the general echo-chamber nature of these threads.
You might also ask yourself why you have twice furnished evidence for other posters, rather than asking them to support their own claims, and consider whether you do this as a general rule, or just because they are on the same side of the political fence as you. This convenient abandonment of scepticism just reinforces confirmation bias.
Click to expand...

Wow. OK.
 
arthwollipot said:
Holy ****, is the entire British government just disintegrating before our eyes?
Click to expand...

Sadly no, it's just that the last few members who have even the tiniest amount of honour or respect for the British public have resigned (after remaining in post through several scandals which would have done for any previous PM and/or government so let's not congratulate them too much) but there are plenty of people without any honour or respect to take their place.

The UK government will continue to operate, albeit with the already pitiful levels of intelligence, honesty, integrity and job suitability significantly diluted, because there is no mechanism to remove the PM for another 12 months apart from a House of Commons vote of no confidence and whilst there might be a couple of Tories willing to support the opposition, the vast majority will support the government because the alternative is turkeys voting for Christmas.

The UK government will continue to wobble on, lurching from scandal to scandal, breaking international laws and kicking key decisions down the road enriching themselves at the expense of the British people - or as we have come to know it under Boris Johnson's premiership - business as usual. :mad::mad::mad:
 
commandlinegamer said:
Cabinet ministers resigning tonight, possibly in order to get their leadership campaign ducks in a row. Maybe Johnson will go down on a ship of one.
Click to expand...

Having recently failed in their no-confidence vote, there's no mechanism for them to launch a leadership campaign for the best part of a year. Unless he choses to resign (insert a herd of laughing dogs here), Boris Johnson is safe for a significant time - long enough for the British Public to forget "Gropegate" in the same way they've forgotten "Partygate", illegally suspending parliament fo force through Brexit legislation, 200,000 Covid deaths, billions in PPE and Covid relief fraud, £10,000s in wallpaper, the PM shagging around whilst his current wife is getting treatment for cancer and any one of dozens of things which would have spelled the end of any previous government.
 
I don't think even he can operate with a cabinet of one though.

As I write this, "tears" in Downing Street, apparently.

Also, though apparently, two separate groups of ministers are present in No. 10, those who want him gone and the remainers. #fightfightfight
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom