Why doesn't anyone have a proper plan for the NHS?

Most European countries have an insurance based health system where the state provides insurance for those unable to work (+ pensioners, students etc) who don't have an employer to provide. So no.

Sorry I misquoted.
I meant that for the poster who said if you haven't paid enough NI, you shouldn't get benefits or health care.

So, people like me who have been disabled and reliant on benefits for all our adult lives: would you like us to starve to death?

@Papyrophile You only have to read the account of the stay in hospital encountered by an elderly stroke victim in the Saturday Times last week to really want that gun! Or at least choice. I could have written similar about DM. The NHS is dreadful for the elderly. Uncaring, disjointed and woeful. It makes patients want to die. At least the relatives involved in the newspaper diary account got to speak to doctors and nurses. I managed no nurses and 3 different doctors one of whom was rude. My DD would back that up!

If anyone in their right mind thinks the elderly are well served in hospital they need to be visiting for a couple of months to really understand how bad it is. Or what a shambles it is regarding talking to social services for help. Never ever do I want that for me. Nor my family.

IMO, which could be wrong, there are several problems. The first and biggest is that NHS was created for a population that was two-thirds of its current size. It provided very basic care in 1947, before antibiotics or cancer treatments and most people lived about 3-10 years post retirement. Now it's routine for people to live to 90, but they usually live with complex, chronic conditions that can be controlled but not cured. And so the bills soar.

Please, if a doctor gives me a diagnosis of a disease that will kill me in 10 years, or five, or one, I'd rather like them to press a handgun into my other hand as they do so. I don't want to be a burden on my DC. I'd rather the short cut to the exit. And I am old, or at least 67.

Sorry. I probably tagged wrong poster! It’s just that we still have people who think they have paid in for their old age. They haven’t. Everything they get is paid for by current tax payers. It’s just not right that some pay less when they use far more and can afford to pay the taxes required. However the grey vote matters! So we maintain triple lock and back off. I’m over retirement age!

I'm also nearing retirement age as well.

I think you missed the thread above in the chain of quotes. First poster, nearing retirement age, said they had 'paid in' enough NI and should not have to continue paying in retirement (if income/earnings high enough)
Second poster agreed with her.
Third poster (me) disagreed and said it clearly wasn't enough.

@Kendodd NI is not “paying in”!!! It’s a tax. It’s not insurance. Why should the better off think they have paid enough to get their benefits, pensions and NHS? Others are paying and they are often the ones supporting dc and have much greater financial constraints. The grey £ is doing pretty well. It could be reduced NI or start at £40,000 income. But it should be paid by retired folk.

Actually I'm going to disagree. I'm a similar age to you and have 'paid in' a similar length of time. Clearly, its not enough.

Of course it is. There are an awful lot of lazy and entitled people in this country who literally seem to think money grows on trees or ‘the government gives it to me’.

Healthcare needs to be redefined. What you can and cannot get for free needs review. Some people would prefer a hybrid system and not have a hike in tax. If older tax payers paid NI it would help. I’m older and I think we should as many are higher users.

No Labour won't put up taxes by 400 a month but they should do in my opinion and that money should go straight to healthcare.

They should break down taxable income so people understand where there money is going. For example does trident offer good value for money when people can't get a dentist.

My point is that healthcare is expensive and most likely will use more than they pay for
Obviously I can't disagree with this, objectively is true that most of us use up more health care than the taxes we personally pay will cover. BUT lots of us work hard in ways that are poorly remunerated or not remunerated at all, just because you're not a higher earner and therefore a high taxpayer, that doesn't mean you have not contributed to society.

These, of course, are very rare cases, but care for people costing over a million, it's that rare. Added the enormous about elderly healthcare cost and chronic conditions.

Here's another drug that cost nearly £3 million.
BBC News - UK’s most expensive drug Libmeldy saved Teddi Shaw, but is too late for her sister
www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64629680

Thing is, if we want that sort of health service, it costs a huge amount of money. I heard on the radio the other day that NICE had recently approved a drug that costs £1.3 million per patient.

Nurses and midwives have always worked shifts. Luckily the birth rate is going down!

We simply don’t have the resources to keep the behemoth NHS going. We do need to accept change. Norway is a rich country with a sovereign wealth fund and much smaller than us. We are not Norway. Therefore we need to decide what we can do to change what we do and how we pay for it.

You're saying that the v nice Labour party will have to hugely put up our taxes to cover the 400 pounds a months that we should be paying - do you really think they'll do that? Unlike the nasty Tories who didn't.

The Tories have always destroyed the NHS, it took Blair a decade to get it back on a its feet.

Unfortunately the Tories have done so much harm that I doubt the next labour government will have the time or the money to do anything.

The only way we can sort it out is to have an adult conversation about costs and tax. We need to set out how much of our tax is set aside for health. At the moment it's too low.

I'll give you a good example...a inlay treatment privately will cost about 1000 privately. So two molars at a private dentist will cost over 2000 pounds. My point is that healthcare is expensive and most likely will use more than they pay for ...which is why we are in this mess. We need to be paying at least 400 pounds a month into healthcare during our working lives to get decent health care....this is not happening.

I worked in Norway for a bit and you paid a lot out but the system worked very well. So not matter what system you choose the bill must be met....if you have private healthcare you'll pay monthly or all at once but reality is the more treatment you need the bills get bigger. So health care insurance sounds great until you need lots of treatment because the insurance company will simply increase your premiums. In America where it's purely private insurance many people find themselves unable to keep up with the premiums.

Simple answer is the NHS is a good system but we need a sensible debate on how we fund it

There's not enough staff to provide the services. But in specific areas the services (in yermsof numbers) aren't being cut. There are countless threads on here about poor maternity care in NHS hospitals. There's a massive shortage of midwives and maternity care assistants. It's not just about the money, who wants to go into a job where no matter how hard you try your work will be slated and belittled, and "those nasty midwives" etc? And you get to miss out on your evening/weekends/nights out and special occasions for the pleasure of it?

The services can't be cut, all women need to be seen to as they present. There's no "oh, we only have capacity for 20 today". So each midwife is spread a little bit thinner, and things are missed, resulting in very unhappy service users, court costs and payouts when the inevitable happens, unhappy staff then leaving the profession, and a service then coping with fewer staff and less money. And although the birth rate is decreasing, the complexity of many pregnancies has exploded! How do you recruit and retain staff into that environment/culture?

The Tories have a detailed plan for the NHS. It just isn't very public, is it. Taking shape, unfortunately.

Not sure what TM solution was but I think the Lib Dems had the best plan. All care is free, but everybody who dies after retirement age pays a 3% tax on their estate, whether they had care or not. This covers it. Again, met with howls of "it's not fair" and binned.

I agree with all that. People always want better state services, but when it comes to paying, they all want "someone else" to pay for it.

Teresa May had it absolutely right with her proposals, but the voters stuck their fingers in their ears and didn't want to hear it. That's meant that those who'd have benefitted from it (the beneficiaries) risk losing their inheritances once the savings have gone for the care home fees and the council put a charge on the property when the savings run out.

Too many people are too ignorant (or just don't care), to do the research to understand how the current system works. It's a bit like the Waspi women who claim they didn't know. Lots of people don't understand that care home fees cost thousands per month and don't understand the criteria as to when the state pays (health reasons) or the person themselves pays (care reasons), and don't understand how councils can put legal charges on homes which means they get the money eventually once the home has been sold out of the estate.

As you say, we need better education. Better education as to how elderly care works and is paid for, better education about healthy lifestyles to help avoid the need for care homes, etc. Something like public information films about dementia would be a brilliant idea to start to get the message across.

@0sm0nthus Thats ok! I think the only way out is insurance as proposed by Teresa May. She introduced it at election time which was a huge mistake. She considered the Dilnot Report and projections for dementia deaths and came to the conclusion we need a different approach. Difficult to get people on board though and look what happened to the con majority in that election. We always went something but won’t pay for it.