To think the time has come to abolish the NHS healthcare model

But obviously the sharks are always circling.

Quite right. As if , given the parlous state of the nhs, milking profits from it will improve the situation!

I work in a health system with both public and private arms.

You are insane if you belive a private system will provide better care to more people.

But i will let DF know that me being articulate will massively help his cancer Im sure it will cheer him up no end!

Despite the assumptions being made about me because i live in social housing I wouldnt actually mind paying something towards seeing a doctor

This.

OP you need to have a look at the private cost of items.

DM and DF are 88

Except nobody can afford to self pay for all of the treatment they might need. Something simple like a broken ankle that needs surgery could end up costing £150k if it gets an infection, and needs further surgery.....

So the only option is either a privately, ir publically funded insurance model, with or without copayments.

£185bn is spent on the NHS and £40bn (17% of the total) on private helathcare which makes up around 12% of the healthcare delivered in the uk. Its therefore already less efficient bwfore even taking into account very little of the very expensive unplaned work such as acute or trauma care, intensive care is undertaken in the private sector.

If the £40bn people spent on private healthcare was spent in the nhs overall, more people would benefit.

Where the fuck are you getting this from. DH and i live in a social housing flat.
DM has osteoporisis and has lost her hearing. DF has prostate cancer and they own their own home.
DB and his partner also own their own home. Ex council but they bought it together.

Im a full time carer for my husband who is 74 I live in Braintree Essex not London.

Do you realise that most EU countries have insurance based models and no one is going bankrupt over there?
I hate how everyone jumps to the US system when someone dares to suggest the NHS should be changed.
For example, in my husband's country, everyone pays insurance out of their salaries, it's compulsory. If you're unemployed, caretaker etc, the government pays it for you.
If you need something extra (ie a private room for postnatal care), you have an option of paying a reasonable amount of money, nothing close to what you'd pay for private maternity in the UK. If you can't/don't want to pay, you still get all the care "for free".

But @JenniferBooth , you clearly live in London, which has more and better opportunities for high quality highly paid employment than any other region. Why are you not pursuing some of the vacancies? Instead of telling me about the need to be at home all the time to keep your social housing. I don't think that occupying social housing and working for a living are mutually exclusive yet.

You @JenniferBooth have sometimes called me out quite rightly on points I had not properly considered or known about, for which I thank you. I hope my posts are more measured as a result.

@JenniferBooth I know from previous threads that you are terribly poor and all your family are massively unwell and disadvantaged, and live in appalling SH conditions in dodgy areas. But you are clearly bright and articulate. So why not invest some of your internet time and energy to improving your family's circumstances?

My OM has been waiting five years for a knee replacement He had yet another fall today............on his birthday.

and the flammable cladding would be coming off of flats a lot quicker
Dagenham was yet another near miss. And people still lost all their belongings.

Waste of time argument as formally removing NHS is never going to happen. It is a political football.
Rather what is happening and will expand is privatisation by stealth with private contractors, some now engaging consultants to become partners, moving in on the several outpatient based specialties and taking on that work (routine ortho, ophthalmology, dermatology etc)

Some facts.

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/reports/high-performing-nhs-review-progress-1997-2010

Oh 1997-2010 those halcyon days when Blair introduced a very expensive additional layer of bureaucracy called PCTs, escalated PFI funding for bright shiny buildings which is at thenroot of many Trust's financial difficulties, introduced 28 day prescribing and guaranteed all patients a next day appointment, only if they were available to attend on the day they made it, withdrawing the right for those with chronic conditions to book inadvance and around professional commitments that taxpayers have. Notwithstanding the destruction of the GP contract which removed out of hours family doctor services for the general public.

During those same halcyon days my dc were denied grommets and a GP failed to diagnose my father's Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.

For some, probably, for NHS workers, definitely. For patients who died or harmed by neglect, mistakes, "fiddling targets", definitely not.

People need to read Consultant Peter Duffy's book "Whistle in the wind" to see how both patients and staff were treated like crap due to poor management, negligence, incompetence and cover ups, finally resulting in the whistle blower himself being hounded out whilst some of the negligent doctors involved continue to practice. It tells you exactly everything that is wrong with the modern NHS. And no, none of that was due to lack of funding!

@RosesAndHellebores "Actually a month or so ago I had a minor bacterial infection and needed some ointment. Boots couldn't sell it to me. I had to go to the doctor for it. It would have taken me about 45 minutes on the phone (our GP practice has stopped appointments via the app now) and much frustration for an appointment at an inconvenient time. Let's say 2.5 hours of my time. (hourly rate: £63 x 2.5 = £157.50). However I get on-line GP services through my insurance. I had an appointment with a nurse practitioner at 9.45pm - no time off work, and the prescription was with the pharmacy the following morning. The prescription cost £14.50 and was cheap at the price.

In the context of GDP calculations nobody ever includes the wasted patient/working time that arises from using the NHS."

Still the question remains - how the hell did the UK population allow itself to get into this situation? Who voted for successive governments that have underfunded the NHS for decades? Who refuses to face the fact that cutting taxes means cutting public services?

@Putting "There needs to be a sensible discussion of what the NHS can and can’t do. Medicine and healthcare has moved on a lot since the NHS was founded - we simply can’t expect a free to use service to cover everything that is available now. We’d be funding nothing but the NHS."

And yet across most of Europe the situation is completely different. There are different forms of "Health Service" - some are funded and organised in a similar way to the UK, some use the "Krankenkasse" system of funding (which is a compulsory, ringfenced "National Insurance" scheme) but overall there has been a political will (and a demand from the population) that healthcare should be well-organised and prioritised, and woe betide any politician who dares to suggest otherwise. Any Health Minister like Hunt, who cut budgets in real terms, caused an exodus of medical staff and who failed to prepare for the pandemic, would have been booted out and never allowed near Parliament again. In the UK, he was promoted to Chancellor, where he continued to smirk while telling the people that there is no money in the pot to resolve the issues that he himself caused.

Meanwhile, sickness costs UK businesses over £100 billion a year - which suggests that far from not being able to afford to invest in improved healthcare, the country cannot afford not to invest.

Yes it was. 1997 to 2010 was a golden age for the NHS.

Entirely agree.

Continental European countries spend more on healthcare Roses. You’re comparing apples and oranges. I want all women to have easy and free access to contraception, it’s one of the big feminist achievements of the last 50 years.

@taxguru "If we just keep chucking more money at the NHS it will end up costing more and more. I'm all for increasing funding, but I was to see massive reform. We can't keep chucking billions into the leaking bucket."

Nobody here is denying that there have to be changes in the NHS, but the reality is that one reason why millions are being poured into the leaky bucket with no impact is that firstly the holes in the bucket have to be mended.

The NHS is trying to provide a service while being hampered by a lack of staff (over 100,000 vacancies), a lack of facilities, poor and outdated equipment and buildings, poor IT and communications systems. From my own experience as an NHS employee and as a patient, my view is that these account for a huge proportion of the 'holes'. Staff are forever trying, often unsuccessfully, to make do with what they've got, to the detriment of the patients and the well-being of the staff themselves. Nowhere else in the developed world has over 10% of the population waiting for a hospital appointment or treatment.

If only we could get into a Time Machine to when labour was last in. Everything was better then, social care, NHS, getting appointments, dental care …