I guess it’s something about contributing to the common good. There’s probably any number of things that your income tax or national insurance pays for from which you derive no benefit whatsoever.
And for what’s it’s worth, private medical insurance provides cover for only a limited range of conditions. Sure, get your knee replacement done in double-quick time, but ongoing conditions - not so much….
But I fear we’re in danger of going off topic, folks.
Sorry, we absolutely are going off topic but I just had to also add that even with the best private health insurance in the UK, if you experience a medical emergency and need extremely urgent and complex care, chances are you’ll be taken straight to a big NHS hospital (at the expense of the taxpayer). So even if you were in the fortunate position of being able to go private for your ongoing and non-urgent care, there’s a high chance you’ll need to utilise NHS services at some point regardless. I think it’s a really important safety net to have in a developed nation, and you never know, if we funded it a bit more there might not be such a need for private healthcare anymore! Overall I’m pretty uneasy with money buying you access to better medical outcomes - a fancier hospital room and gourmet breakfasts fair enough, but life-saving treatments at the expense of those who can’t afford to bypass the waiting lists, no.
Again, I will continue this off topic train of thought but I’d like to ask those spouting nonsense about the NHS to look at the good ol’ US of A
The land of the free, where you are free to go bankrupt if you dare to break a limb. Where you’re free to die if you can’t afford the heavily jacked up price of insulin. Where a single visit to a hospital can run you tens of thousands of dollars even with private health insurance. Where you’re free to barter with the hospital to try and arrange a payment plan you may or may not be able to afford
2 very valid points.
Maybe what we really need is a properly funded and managed NHS, with private health to compliment, and not compete with it.
And as for the US system, well that really is a shambles.
I’d say if you can afford it, though, the standard of care is often significantly better. Treatments and investigations are far more proactive and preventative (again, only if you can afford it), and the hospitals don’t look like they’re falling down (I’ve been to NHS hospitals that are more prefab than brick). Also, it’d be hypocritical for me to complain about the healthcare system over there, since I fairly recently had a lifesaving operation that was wholly developed by a team in a US hospital. They often have the abundance of funds in their highly commercialised system to make such clinical breakthroughs over there, and then we send a team of British medics over to learn the skills and perform and reteach them for free back home in the UK.
And so while it’s great that we have the NHS for what it is, we shouldn’t let fawning over it get in the way of identifying the very real major flaws in it and seeking to improve it. There are reasons that many people pay to go privately even here, if only we could create a healthcare system that is acceptable to everybody. I wonder what would happen if we limited private healthcare options to just getting a fancier room and delicious meals in hospital?
Worth saying though that not everyone in this country who uses private healthcare is rich - some people are in a really desperate state, and NHS wait times and stringent operation funding criteria can leave some individuals totally out of luck on the NHS, stuck in either a lifetime of chronic pain/poor quality of life or in some cases far worse.
Maybe the government should start first by using the heavy borrowing as an excuse to spend £1-2bn on migrating the NHS to an entirely digital thing, paired with integrating Apple Health / Google Fit and starting a data analytics division.
It could be absolutely useful in preventative care. Could even prescribe devices to patients.
If it worked well, I’d agree; currently: it sucks
Gets a lot of money already, the only changes I’d really make is offering 5 year citizenship tracks for those working in the NHS, a double in salary to be frozen for the next half decade (as in it would double and be zero raise for 5 years minimum) and then wholesale import those who have experience in countries with good healthcare systems and training
It saved my life 
Edit: agreed on the importance of harnessing foreign talent though - further to the point above my surgeon was Greek, my nurses were Portuguese, Filipino and African.
It’s kept me bouncing between the walk in centre crying, at home taking tablets to make me feel like not shit and begging for appointments over the phone or in person
There’s no follow up (my doctor was literally told he can’t book me a follow-up), a same day booking policy which is not easy for those on small money or zero hour contracts (take time off work to call and then no appointments). Inferior rates of survival when it comes to serious illness vs the US due to these massive wait times
Terrible value for the taxpayer. Terrible value for human life. Terrible value for the pharmaceutical companies. Terrible value for the insurance companies. Terrible value for those paying for medication too.
While it saves some lives it leaves others with literally no hope and years of prolonged problems
That sounds very familiar, I’m sorry you’ve experienced that. The NHS can be total shite at times, but it’s a tricky one because it does also save a hell of a lot of lives. So let’s say we scrap it and all have to pay private insurance or PAYG for private healthcare… but what about those who couldn’t afford the really expensive treatments they require (even a good insurance policy often doesn’t cover the full amount, and don’t even get me started on pre-existing conditions)? A full cancer treatment pathway including chemo, radiotherapy and surgery can run into the 100,000s, if not millions. I don’t see that as civilised.
This doesn’t exactly inspire sympathy!
How? In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland they literally have free (at point of use) prescriptions, and in England if you’re on a lot of regular medication you can get an annual prepaid certificate for like £100, and that grants you unlimited prescriptions. How is that not good value? Do you know how much some people are screwed by the cost of medicines in the US?
You’re obviously warming to the topic, but that notion doesn’t really stand up.
Digitisation has its place, and there’s surely much more that can meaningfully be digitised within our healthcare system, but not that……
It’s a bad comparison to be honest, the system is very different. What I do know is that even on a modest wage you can be paying huge sums of money into the NHS. I was surprised to learn from friends in the US that a lot of people in the UK are paying more in NHS costs than people in the US do for health insurance. I was even paying more than my US friends.
Regardless one of the big problems with the NHS is that it’s a bottomless money sink. It wouldn’t matter if we tripled the budget the money would simply be eaten up by the NHS and they’d still be asking for more.
The fact that the NHS is one huge monopoly funded by the government means it has no reason to function effectively or manage money properly. It has no competition, no incentive to improve and like every government organisation it’s filled to the brim with utterly useless middle managers finding reasons to waste as much money and time as possible.
The solution is probably somewhere in the middle I think, I don’t mind paying something from my wage regardless or use, I also think we should be paying something on use as well even if it’s minimal, and we need to make if much leaner and we need to incentivise it somehow, but the NHS is broken and we really need to accept that before we can actually make it better.
What’s certainly true is if I’m paying more for a broken NHS and my US friend is paying less for prince health care then something has gone wrong.
The thing about insurance is that it is priced based upon risk - you may know people who pay less for health insurance than many ‘pay into’ the NHS via taxation here, but there will be many who pay many multiples of that just for having the cheek of having a medical condition.
Isn’t that how things should work?
The cheek is assuming someone else should subsidise your risk with a higher £ price
And I’m not saying we should use the same system. But it’s really not worth what people are paying in the UK. The waste is enormous
No, not in civilised society.
I really don’t see how waste would be any less with other systems - the scale of healthcare delivery requires big organisations, even if you introduce competition. Big organisations, whether private or public, have massive amounts of waste. Particularly if the service being offered is essential, like healthcare, and where competition doesn’t really work, like healthcare (if you’re dying you aren’t going to be choosy about which hospital you go to).
Have you ever worked for government? Not all orgs are bad… but most are really bad. Huge amounts of waste, huge sums of frivolous spending, huge amounts of pointless middle management.
The NHSs solution to frivolous spending is to hire expensive full time employees who’s jobs are to go through peoples medial records and cut peoples medical treatments and prescriptions… the result is most of these patients end up back in hospital costing even more money.
Just because an organisation is big doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve it.
Yes.
Waste isn’t a public vs. private matter.
It is an issue around ‘everyday’ employees not having a real link to the profits of the company - if your bog standard workers don’t really care, then you will get waste.
Now, this can be mitigated where competition is high as the money simply won’t be there for costs to go above what your competitors also selling the same product for - but with healthcare you don’t have that, because people will always need healthcare and will go to the nearest hospital to get it - and insurers don’t care because they just put premiums up to cover whatever costs they have.
So you then have the assurance of income which means that even more senior managers don’t really need to worry about costs as they can always put prices up where required.
Waste would not reduce - you’d just be rearranging the deck chairs - and, ironically, introducing another layer of waste from the insurance companies.
I’m not saying waste should not be tackled in the NHS, and every other govt organisation - I’m just saying be wary of the snake-oil salesmen trying to sell privatisation as the solution to all waste. It very rarely helps in that regard.
I’m interested to know where and how this happens. And given the regulatory bodies (CQC etc) how would such behaviour pass scrutiny?
I get that NICE have to make judgements on clinical efficacy of drugs and health bodies need to determine whether they can support expensive drug regimes for complex cases, but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying.
I’m glad to see you also supported British colonisation, as that was just us making places more civil
(your definition nor anyone’s is a good argument because that validates a lot of poor or controversial topics i.e. colonisation or manifest destiny and stripping US reservations of native Americans)
Meanwhile my easy solution is having citizens health data tracked via an official app or tapping into existing sources and hiring big data executives to show us how to do it
Would save billions & make the NHS the most modern health service on planet Earth. Maybe we could even sell that to other countries to cover our costs to provide it
This is the main thing imo, FOI and a million other accountability sections of government and ensuring everything is in a position that won’t result in a scandal and a snap election
I don’t know how pervasive it is in the rest of the NHS but they’ve been hiring these people in NHS Scotland and plan to hire more. Their jobs including cutting health care plans and treatments to patients where they feel it’s no longer needed without consultation to their health care providers or the patient. They just get cut off.
I’ve seen this happen to patients with complex medial needs who are on suplemental treatments to ensure they’re taking in enough nutrients and don’t die from starvation. These people have gone and cut them off and the end results have been people ending up back in hospital from several weight loss as they’ve effectively cut off their food supply and starved them.
They don’t care and have no direct knowledge of the patients or their needs. They just make determinations to cut people off treatments to ‘save money’