Is the NHS now about treating 'shi t life syndrome'?

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/03/the-guardian-view-on-labours-nhs-plan-it-is-right-to-celebrate-medical-science-but-delivery-is-the-hard-part

A Guardian article but it seems like this push to reduce health inequality is making the NHS look like part of our benefits system. While I agree with good health for all is this strategy going to appeal to a middle class tax payer base who are a lot of their tax going to a struggling NHS with the money ultimately flowing from their pockets to more deprived areas? It seems like the poorer the area the more snazzier and funded your health service will be and I just wonder if ultimately this may too the balance towards a more health insurance based syatem?

Why does everything have to be about appealing to the middle class?

Because they subsidise and pay for all of this.

the ultra wealthy (non dom and legal tax avoiders) and the 52.6% net recipients arent funding this - the MC are.

Nothing is appealing for MC in UK right now which is why half of us are looking to emigrate taking all our lovely tax money with us.

I have 2 children in child care and so have an effective 80 something percent tax on a portion of my pay. It's pure BS... just like this Labour policy. The very least they can do is introduce some / any policies that benefit me and my family given I'm one of the work horses keeping their shitshow on the road.

Because the middle class pay the most tax.....

Having NHS money flow from wealthier areas to poorer is very much a socialist principle and I wonder if socialism has a limit with the British public's appetite .

Are we going to be spending horrendous amounts of money vainly trying to stop the people of Blackpool eating shit, smoking etc. with virtuous outreach projects or should we look to more cutting edge technology looking at the genetic causes of disease?

The middle classes rightly worry about the most important thing in the world, their families health. If you start offering a universally sub standard service because money is flowing toward regions of deprivation ultimately you will get more and more of middle Britain wondering where their tax is going and do they have a health service that is for for purpose for their family. The calls for a complete rethink of our healthcare system is bound to happen.

Are you for real? It isn't an 'outreach project' to try to correct the underprovision of healthcare in deprived areas.

Your use ot the term speaks to your conception of society -- the people you call 'middle class' literally in the middle and whole swathes of people cast to the margins.

What happened to the troubled families programme, this is similar Im guessing a huge amount of fanfare and funding and then slightly drizzle away

So middle class pay most tax that means we can forget the working class? Who are incidentally the ones who actually keep the country running. Let's see how far we get without binmen/cleaners/carers/healthcare assistants/supermarket workers/delivery drivers/bus drivers/farm labourers. Let's see the middle class survive without them. Some of them might even live in shock horror Blackpool.

I don't think we should create policies based on the greed of the middle class, but for the good of everyone - even the ones who don't have much money.

Wow. Compassion? Shame you can’t buy any with your chunky salary. Isn’t it in everybody’s interest to try and break the cycle of ill health and deprivation that plagues certain areas & communities? If you want to pay less tax something has to be done to lower the welfare bill and getting people well enough to work. How would you do it? Genuinely interested in your solutions.

I’m confused. Is it only in the last 12 months that you became a work horse keeping this shitshow on the road? Or has it only been a shit show for the last 12 months for you?

As a higher rate tax payer, and a user of the NHS for a chronic condition, I can assure you this ‘shit show’ has been running for more than one season.

I am tired of the rhetoric that everything in England became awful in the last year. The Conservative Party and their truly horrendous leadership (5 leaders and I lost count of how many chancellors In 14 years) damaged this country, our country, for the sake of their party. It will take more than a decade to rebuild the foundation services we rely upon.

The division in this country benefits no one. I’m not saying Labour are doing brilliantly, and I certainly didn’t vote Labour, but I don’t think any party could have turned things around in 12 months.

I think it's not about lack of compassion but seeing how left wing our health care needs to be. Is it fair to offer everyone a relatively poor service or do we allow some gradation of health care options and that in a capitalist society involves financial choice i.e. how you spend your money.

I just think so you reach a point as with disability benefits that people start to call out the NHSq as the taxation burden increases. There seems to be no penalty for collective poor lifestyle choices and indeed you could say there is a benefit in that if there is a culture of poor lifestyle then you will be rewarded with more state funded health care.

What about the working class people working in childcare who are looking after your children for you so you can work a middle class job?

if you don’t look after them, they aren’t going to look after you.

There doesnt have to be a universally poor service, which is actually what we have now.

It doesnt matter what area you're in, trying to get a GP appointment or NHS dentist or a reasonable wait at A+E or a reasonable wait once you've been referred to a consultant or something, is dire across the country.

Its a long time since a labour government got waiting times down and it was a huge focused piece of work. Here we are again trying to do that after years of austerity

Except this time Brexit has taken away lots of people who do those jobs.

Totally agree, and fed up with the cries of
"How evil are you!! You want to bring back the workhouses and for babies and children to STARVE!!!" No actually like @Lafufufu fed up with certain areas having free 52 weeks a year (minus Christmas hols) childcare... as long as you don't work of course, hundreds of thousands of pounds pumped into them for social and activity events and buildings, and other areas having things shut down because 'people like that should fund this themselves..' ie libraries, sure start etc.

I live in a deprived region of England but shock horror, have a “middle class” job.

In my area the median age is 56. I’m sure according to this policy my area would receive more funds to healthcare than most, but it would be due to a more elderly population - not the “druggies”.

Yabu, tackling health inequalities and investing in prevention will cost the state less in the long term and will ultimately benefit all of us.

I’d read that poorer areas were actually in receipt of less funding per head for medical services eg GPs, so this would actually be balancing that out - rather than giving these areas better services than wealthier services.

I do think there’s a general trend of seeing all taxation and government spending as exclusively for the purpose of wealth distribution, which I don’t actually think should be the purpose of it.

We are paying taxes for services (which increasingly aren’t very good), the state needs to function and add value for everyone, not just those on low incomes.

Most of this won't happen. The plan is a political agenda (now more than ever) with no information about how it's actually going to be delivered.

In any case, correcting the underprovision of healthcare in deprived areas doesn't exclusively benefit the poorer people living there. Believe it or not, NHS facilities in more deprived areas are open to people of all classes, and the 'middle class' in those areas suffer as much as anyone else from the relative lack of adequate healthcare in those areas. Serves them right for mixing with the great unwashed, I suppose🙄

The NHS is currently failing everyone. It's not going to get suddenly worse for people who aren't poor just because resources are allocated more efficiently.

Long term, tackling health inequalities is cheaper. Bear in mind the US system, which is famous for only caring about the insured, costs more to run its safety nets (Medicare/Medicaid) per capita of the population the NHS costs to run.

Why hasn't it worked yet @MrsBennetsPoorNerves the area local to me which is highest in 'health inequalities'has probably been so for at least the last century, and has probably had the most funding since the welfare state began, but there doesn't seem to be any changes.

Prevention is always infinitely cheaper than treatment.

Would you prefer more of your lovely tax money to fund cancer, COPD and diabetes treatment? A night in hospital with no medicine is between £4-500, and cancer treatment can cost thousands. And then there's paying to support people who are too ill to work.

Health promotion isn't just the right thing to do, it makes economic sense, as does targeting health interventions in areas that need it most.

Currently poorer areas have less decent healthcare on the whole so this re-addresses the balance.

Also a lot of poorer areas are seaside towns or more rural areas which are popular places for your middle class "workhorses" to move out to avoid rising house prices in London and, especially to retire to. (Think about beautiful rural parts of Wales, Cornwall etc that are really close geographically to incredibly deprived areas). That means already struggling areas then have a higher burden of healthcare costs on average because older population= more healthcare. If community health care keeps people from filling beds with preventable illnesses that means more hospital care for people that really need it including shock horror middle classes escape to the country types. And preventing illnesses like diabetes from developing is cheaper than treating it, which is itself cheaper than amputating someone's foot.

Health insurance costs in a fully privatised system are really high by the way. And people in America still then have to pay really high excesses. I have known people with really good incomes stressing about it. So even if you are a net contributed here, switching to a private system would probably cost you personally more not less.

There seems to be no penalty for collective poor lifestyle choices and indeed you could say there is a benefit in that if there is a culture of poor lifestyle then you will be rewarded with more state funded health care.

Well, not true. There’s early death for a start - around 10 years sooner than their counterparts in leafy green Hampshire for example. This means that they don’t collect up to £210,000 in state pension that their wealthier, alive counterparts do. And the rest.

The cynical part of me is expecting a huge amount of money to be spent on an agency that designs a healthy living app, with printed leaflets as well for the supposedly huge proportion of society that can’t afford a mobile phone. This will have fun games that tell you to swap a packet of crisps either some chopped up apple etc. And perhaps get off a bus stop early.

Meanwhile the waiting list continues to grow, with people from all backgrounds needing joint replacements, cataract surgery, hysterectomies etc. But the private sector can cherry pick these cases for a headline amazing price, so don’t worry.

Meanwhile the existing network of crumbling NHS hospitals with burnt out staff can deal with all the complex cases, and older but reasonably well off people who are lying in bed waiting for a nursing home or an insufficient package of care. But because of AI and expensive contracts with home care agencies the hospitals can do this with a smaller budget.

Its also weird to think about "state funded healthcare" being a reward for poor lifestyle choices. Like if you fail to manage your diabetes you are "rewarded" with a free leg amputation whereas health eating me gets punished by having no free operations😥. Like it's the equivalent of trying to eat/drink as much as possible on an all inclusive to get your money's worth. Just a very odd way of thinking about the world.