Tories

This.

 

pictorial evidence needed.

 

It was a question, i don't fully know the reforms in detail.

What I do know is that the BMA i think, only 2,000ish out of 40,000 members signed the petition against the bill, so to say all medical unions are against it is misleading. My own GP said it seems like a good idea to have money spent by those on the front line who see patients and their reactions day in day out. Out of my friends and family et al I would say the majority support the bill

Ok thanks for clearing it up. Why is it in the interests for the private sector to provide base level care? Surely not only do they have a duty of care to patients, the same as the NHS, but it is in their interests to give increased levels of care, in order to advertise if you like why they are better than the NHS? It seems to me just scaremongering when people say a dangerously low level of care. They aren't going to be letting patients die instead of providing costly medical treatment. It's not the same industry as others, it's far far more complex so i don't think its right to be able to make those accusations just yet.

 

Sorry but you are wrong here. They are putting the choice in the hands of the GPs so in effect the govenrment does not make the choice, the GP does. Whether a GP has the time and skils to make the decision is another matter of course.

 

GP`s arent civil servants , they are well paid private sector employees , with a vested interest in money saving

 

Because Simms a private company has to make continually greater profits which can only be done by raising prices, increasing customer footfall or cutting costs. When a price ceiling is reached, and only x amount of people a year need to use their service (because it isn't a choice to become ill) they have to cut costs somewhere or other or risk turning reduced profits.

Have you seen American private healthcare? Yes they will let people die instead of providing treatment. The private sector is not an altruistic service, it exists only to turn profit. You are not a patient, you are a customer. If the customer can't pay the price for the good, they don't get the treatment. Obviously we are not implementing the American system, but we would be a damn sight closer to it than Germany for example! Public/private medical services on the continent have huge safeguards preventing all sorts of malpractice, ensuring full liability and accountability for the private firms blah blah blah. One of the major problems experts have had with this bill is it provides none of that.

The argument goes that the incentive to perform well and treat customers right is there because otherwise you wouldn't make any money. The exact same argument used to support the privatisation of the trains, the utilities, the banks and everything else. What happens in reality is that they survive in an oligarchic market where there are only a handful of companies, so there is no real competition at all, just lots of collusion. Hence prices go up, service is reduced while all of us mugs have to pay the price anyway because there isn't an alternative. Welcome to the new health sector, where the beneficiaries are those who own the private firms, the many people in government with their fingers in private health company pies, and that is it. We all have to pay more for less. With our taxes we will be paying only for the loss making, expensive, lengthy procedures.

Will taxes be going down for example once the 'burden' of the NHS is lifted? Like hell they will. They will, at best, remain exactly the same. All the happens is our cost of living takes a huge leap while we are held to ransom for our health.

We already have a very effective health service which provides excellent value for money, free at the point of care. This is being changed for the benefit of a handful of people whose interests are in line with it.

Yes, but who are GPs always going to choose? The lowest bidder or the preferred bidder.

GPs are not altruistic beings who exist to serve our health, they earn £100k and are often terrible at their job and give you antibiotics for everything. Some of the GPs I have seen can barely speak English, let alone resist powerful people leaning on them to send contracts their way. One way or another, like with all 'private' contracts in the public service, they will end up with the 'correct' firm. The Tories have a great track record of ensuring that privatised markets provide excellent value for money, healthy competition and great service don't they?










Just as a side note, I don't want things getting all heated here. People have different views on politics and have different leanings and backgrounds. This is just a friendly discussion thread.

 

I disagree. Why do private medical care companies currently have much higher levels of patient satisfaction than the NHS? If they were bumping expensive patients off in their sleep in ordr to reduce costs people would not be happy with the service.

That's just scaremongering im afraid.

 

But I thought private health companies only care about profits and are not altruistic companies?

 

So they can be loving caring people who put patients first and don't give a f**k about profits sometimes, yet others they don't give a f**k about patients and care only for money?

 

Simms you are just making things up that have no relation to anything I said.

Private healthcare has higher patient satisfaction because it is EXPENSIVE. You pay for what you get! The point of the NHS is that only a minority can afford private healthcare, which was the entire reason for its creation! I have no idea why you think that is relevant in any way? OF course if you pay thousands of pounds you can get better treatment, but most people cannot afford that, hence why we created a system of universal healthcare! You pay an enormous premium for private healthcare, if you reduce the price and increase availability to be affordable to the masses you reduce the level of care to that level too, but the level of care goes even lower since you also have to make a profit margin on top of costs. I sincerely hope you do not think that this is about introducing thousands of BUPA clinics where everyone will have their own nurse, have days and days in their own private room and have the best available treatment without any waiting list?

And where did I say they were bumping people off to reduce costs? In America if you can't pay then you don't get any treatment and you die, which completely destroys your idea that "They aren't going to be letting patients die instead of providing costly medical treatment", because without any regulation, they do. I then even said that this bill doesn't represent the American system at all, but you have decided to ignore pretty much everything I said and respond with two irrelevant sentences.

 

You said patient care would fall so i was disagreeing.

But it's the government who are paying the private companies to provide care, not pay as you recieve it? It is in their interests to continue to get contracts from the government.

In america are private medical companies except from the rule of law? Or in america is it legal to allow somebody to die in your care?

 

Private medical companies have been going for years as supposedly caring companies without realising the true expense.

 

No you don't die in their care, because you are never in their care Simms. You buy health insurance, if you can't afford it you receive no medical care at all, which is why Obama's health bill was so important as it covered people who could previously not afford it.

Yes, I said patient care would fall. You responded by telling me that current private healthcare satisfaction is higher, which is irrelevant since that healthcare only needs to be available to a relative handful of people. If the NHS ionly had a to treat a few thousand people their care would be fantastic too. Its like comparing Apples and Oranges.

Exactly, and the funding from the government is being annihilated, meaning that all the contracts will have to go to the cheapest provider - i.e. the one with the lowest costs per patient. It is a race to the bottom, a race to see who can provide the cheapest, worst care with the quickest patient turnaround but still be legal.

 

Ok I understand.

I disagree. I don't believe patient care would fall. It just seems strange to me that one day they care about patients and the next they don't give a f**k about them simply because they are caring for more patients and recieveing comparitively more government money at the same time.

Where is the evidence that private health care companies will be spending less per-patient than the current wasteful NHS?

 

When healthcare becomes a business venture, as opposed to a service, you're treading a fine line. Greed overtakes ethics eventually.

 

simms, PG and dom are not saying that doctors will suddenly all become people that don't care about patients. For God's sake.

 

Whether or not they care about patients is entirely irrelevant, and they won't be receiving comparatively more money. The budget is being cut massively, which means the services the NHS currently provide will have to be done on less money, which is the whole point of the exercise. The only evidence that they will be provided cheaper is from liberal economic theory. In reality the private firms exist only to make profit, otherwise they would not exist or be providing care. That is the clash of motive. The NHS exists solely to provide healthcare, there is no other motive. They want to provide the best healthcare within the budget they are given, they do not want to provide the cheapest healthcare that is still legal.

Now, where is your evidence that the NHS is so 'wasteful'? I hear people go on about middle managers and bureaucracy, but strangely there never seem to be any figures to back it up. Exactly how many middle managers are twiddling their thumbs in an office in Watford General, sipping coffee and doing nothing? Sure, according to the boys in blue there are simply thousands of them, leeching off of taxpayers. But according to the boys in blue, they would cut the deficit, not the NHS. And they didn't say anything about introducing private toll roads either. Governments lie, and it wouldn't surprise me if there weren't a whole lot of middle managers in the NHS doing nothing, and they actually were performing necessary tasks which it is wrongly assumed can be rolled into other roles, where their tasks would then be performed badly.

And what exactly counts as 'waste' in the NHS? Can we have 'too many' nurses? If a ward has 'too many nurses', should we sack them? And then one night when there is an unusual amount of injuries, or a big accident, there aren't enough nurses and somebody dies? 'Too many doctors'? 'Too many surgeons'? I have heard Cameron go on about how he is going to use the money saved from sacking the 'managers' to protect the frontline staff, but just today it turns out 1% of nurses were sacked last year. That is nearly 40,000 by my reckoning. Certainly not improving frontline care then eh?

Health is not a business. We should have too many nurses, too many hospital beds. People's lives are not numbers and figures, they are lives. I do not want us to have the cheapest possible healthcare, I want us to have the best possible healthcare. If there are twenty surgeons in a hospital you may look at the data and think 'well, usually we only need fifteen. we can sack five of them', an then somebody dies as a result, is that justified?

The NHS should never be considered a regular business, because it is not. It is about providing the best level of service, not the cheapest. We have just started going down a very slippery slope where patient care is at the very bottom of the list of priorities.

 

Simms , you are coming across as someone who lives in some sort of Utopia

The men and woman on the ground wont start to care less (other than the ones that dont care to start with) , a company must operate at a certain margin or it cant be sustained

 

They've left alcohol alone in the budget which is brilliant news for small pubs everywhere. Tobacco is going up 37p per packet though and hot chickens in supermarkets now being taxed!

 

If Simms disagrees with me again I might hang myself, I'm doing my best.




Good to see the budget too, its about time out cost of living went up while businesses' costs are reduced. I don't think I pay enough tax at the moment. Maybe they should work on getting corporations to pay some frigging tax rather than taxing me more every bloody year.

 

Ultimately, it does boil down to this:

If you disagree about this, there's not much point arguing with those people who do believe this about any other aspect of the Bill. It'll simply all come back to this point.

 

I could have brought this up earlier but I missed the discussion about tax rates somewhat. People that say a 50p tax rate will stifle business are not acknowledging the huge tax breaks that BUSINESSES get. I missed the boat here, so I can't be bothered to get a few article links up, but those who know more than me off the top of their head may fill in the blanks, because it seems like that discussion never really reached a satisfactory resolution (i.e. one that realised an extra 5p tax on every pound earned over £150,000 is not a ludicrous business-killing injustice...).

 

So you're basing your critique on untested non-empirical theory as opposed to hard figures and facts. Apart from that, possibley.

An independant study by the soil association or some such association found the NHS are wasting millions on sourcing food from outside the uk, when it would be cheaper to source it from local providers. Something like 95% of NHS meal food is sourced from outside the UK wasteing millions that could be spent on nurses and cancer treatment etc etc.

That's exactly the sort of logic that caused the defecit. Lets blinding throw money at the NHS with no accountability or regulation so we can cut waiting times and customer satisfaction as opposed to spending the money correctly, and getting more out of each pound spent.

About the 50p tax rate, HMRC are releasing a report today saying that the figures recieved from the increased tax were a fraction of what was expected, and may be cancelled out due to other tax losses as a result to the damage it's doing to our economy. So the 50p tax rate is reportedly not increasing tax revenue, but is also destroying the economy and not stimulating growth and jobs. The fall to 45p will raise tax revenue, and support our economy.

 

Be careful here. What you are saying is actually that the quality of care will go down, but that's through no fault of the frontline staff.

 

A side question what would people prefer. Low taxes and lower care but more cash in hand, or higher taxes, higher care but less cash in hand?