Help save the NHS - UK's free healthcare

General Discussion
#1

The UK government is trying to get rid of free healthcare by opening up the system to private companies. That isn’t a good idea, since it will mean millions of people are left without healthcare. (This same government is OK with privatising the police and forcing terminally ill people to work or lose welfare.)

By Monday, it will be too late to stop this happening. If you are in the UK, please sign this petition today. It will be presented to the House of Lords on Monday, so it’s not just e-drama.

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/Protect_our_NHS_Petition#petition

If you have any questions about healthcare here, I’ll do my best to answer.

#2

Public health care is for sissies, capitalism all the way.

/AMURIKA

#3

As an American with tons of unpaid hospital bills… I just want to say… :rofl:

#4

I support the decision. You should have posted a stupid petition for the other half.

#5

gets out popcorn, waits for the inevitable riots to ensue

#6

No they aren’t.

I wish that posts had a “hate” button next to the “like” button.

#7

Good luck with this, Hatchet. I hope your country’s decision makers make the right decision not to scrap its healthcare.

#8

Umm… no. And I’m technically working in the NHS. Anyhow, we may not like it but publically funded healthcare isn’t going anywhere in this country. Canada runs a similar system where the hospitals are privately owned but healthcare is still run by the government.

Understand the premise before posting an argument. Not that I like what’s happening, but it’s sad when you see negative reactions for the ‘wrong’ reasons.

#9

what?.. i’m having an NHS operation next week. i aint paying shit.

#10

Of course they are, they’re just taking a longer route.

Head of competiton in NHS gets, what 80k a year from a is private health company?

Hospitals to use 49% of beds for private patients

Hospitals in Devon outsourcing children’s services to serco - who normally deal with prisoners - or virgin

Handing spending to GPs, some of whom they won’t be able to handle it (who will take up slack when it goes wrong)

Refusing to release a ‘risk’ document about the process.

I’m on my iPad so each time I leave this tab my text resets, but go and look at the guardian or 38 degrees to see just how much shit is being pulled. And go and look at how many interests people in the government have with private health care corps.

You think privatisation is going to be announced all at once by a bloke in a top hat an monocle? Of course not. It’ll come with made-up states about NHS failure rates and how competiton solves everything.

Guys, we’re on a fighting game forum. We know how easy it is for games to become broken and unbalanced; the same thing applies to healthcare as it does to finance.

#11

It’s annoying because I didn’t vote for them, now they’re fucking everything up

#12

That’s interesting.

I’m not from the UK, and I havn’t done any research on your health care system, but I do know the problems that come from a health care system where the government pays private companies (Medicare and Medicaid in the US), like over-diagnosis to get the most expensive (and profitable) treatments.

Doesn’t sound like a good deal for the people.

#13

Since you’re not from the UK, I’ll give you a protip:

The British left is just as paranoid and delusional as the American right.

You know how some hardcore Republicans genuinely believed that Obama was going to imprison Christians, show gay porn to children in school in an effort to “convert” them and replace “In God we Trust” with “Allahu Akbar”?

The British left do exactly the same thing. Their beliefs revolve around Conservatives trying to get rid of the NHS, roll back all reforms made in the last hundred years and introduce 19th-century Russian serfdom to the majority of British citizens.

Note the reliance on slippery-slope arguments, the claim that everything is being done by stealth and stories and op-eds from far-left news sources.

#14

The term you’re looking for, 1dgaf, is ‘slippery slope.’ And yes, EVERYBODY should be concerned about slippery slopes into bad places regardless of nationality or political leanings. I hope you guys can keep your government coverage. I work for a healthcare org, so I have an idea how down right greedy (if now completely corrupt) it can be.

#15

Thanks for the info, I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting as well.

So what are your thoughts on this law?

#16

Just to be sure, NHS healthcare is not free. It’s prepaid. The government allocates tax revenue to budget for the NHS, its free at the point of consumption, not at the point of creation. It might be ‘essentially’ free for low income Britons who’s effective tax rate is zero and therefore they’re effectively subsidized by more wealthy citizens, but NHS is not ‘free’. It might sound semantic but there is very little in the universe that is ‘free’.

And let me just throw this idea out there. Would it be so bad, if the UK Government decided private firms could be established to provide health care services outside of the NHS purview? Would it be such a castrophe if a primary care physician didn’t want to deal with government bureaucracy and decided to say “I’ll charge X pounds per visit, but I’ll have fewer patients and have more accessibility?” I’m just curious how this would look to someone from the UK. Do physicians in the UK have some sort of unique responsibility to the State to take lower salaries than their private counterparts in other countries and be government employees?

#17

There’s nothing wrong with the NHS.
You have the choice to pay privately, and if you decide to the only difference with the NHS is that you wait a few days for your operation rather than 2-3 months.

You guys NEED the exact same healthcare system in America.

#18

My main thought is that it doesn’t matter, since I doubt it will survive in its current form, regardless of the actions of pressure groups (but if the givernment does back down, I’m sure that pressure groups will take credit).

Fundamentally, the bill doesn’t seem to change very much (although I’ll confess to not having read all 367 pages of the bloody thing). Rather than a huge government bureaucracy, the government will hire private bureaucrats to waste taxpayer money. As someone else in this thread has stated, the idea is that Britain will become more like countries such as Canada, where private companies own hospitals but the healthcare system is free at the point of service. Note that no-one says that Canada does not have public healthcare (of a higher standard than ours, so I’ve heard) just because the hospitals are privately owned. And notice that there has been no slippery slope towards full privatisation in the other countries with this model.

I have no problem with this change. Obviously, some people in the NHS will have their knickers in a twist, but this happens with any kind of reform.

And the most important thing that the people who think that the bill is an attempt to get rid of the NHS forget is that if the NHS were abolished, the party that got rid of it would never get voted into power again. There would be riots in the streets and Labour would win a massive landslide in every general election for the next generation, making the rebuilding of the NHS their first priority. David Cameron might not be the sharpest tool in the box, but he won’t allow that to happen.

The NHS is far too deeply ingrained in British culture to be abolished.

#19

This statement bodies every stupid newspaper article, free.
Canadians don’t bat an eye nor hesitate calling their system a public, free at point of care system; much more private than the NHS.
NHS healthcare needs to move forward some way… keeping it the current model is simply not sustainable. At least, as long as the government continues to cut funding other than petty promises at election time. Complaining about it and not coming up with an alternative solution is, in essence, preaching to closed ears. I surely do not know how or I would have gone into healthcare politics.

#20

The British left aren’t paranoid, they are* concerned*. Concerned because the people aren’t being listened to and that the government is withholding information. Not only this govt., but the previous one was shady as well.

Also, because the** man in charge of policing competition in the NHS also runs one of the UK’s biggest healthcare companies**. That’s just one example of fucking bulshit. Imagine having a locksmith round to replace your locks, then finding out he’s the biggest burglar in your area.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/04/nhs-watchdog-ccp-lord-carter

When they were in opposition, one of the tories said the NHS would fail to exist if they got in:

The prime minister had a disabled son who died. He said the NHs helped his son, which is why it would be protected. Now, this article is just obversation and it’s a very delicate subject, but I think it’s worth reading for context.

(By the way, the prime minister collected disability welfare. The UK govt. is now portraying disabled people as welfare scroungers and verbal/physical attacks on the disabled have gone up.)