to be worried about "4% tax rises every year for 15 years just to keep the nhs functioning at its current level"

[traciebanbanjo]

According to a think tank. But even if it's only 1/4 of that it's still a huge amount. I don't know how I would ever affod that much.

And they say that's just to keep it at its current level. It's the main headline on LBC and in all the papers.

I'm very worried about coming tax rises

The NHS is underfunded. Bring on the extra tax I say.

These sorts of threads come round regularly. The fact is that the NHS is a behemoth that should have been tackled long ago but Governments are too frightened to get to grips with the sacred cow.

Been saying this for years. It needs a total overhaul and if the British Public want the NHS to provide every treatment it seems to think it should, then I'm afraid we're all going to have to pay for it to the tune of several percent increase on income tax.

People are living much longer lives than when it was introduced. This produces more demands on the system. It is doing too many things it was never designed or intended for. IVF being a prime example. Of course it's awful if you can't have children and you desperately want them; but the NHS should not be funding this in its current state.

There are people who can't get £6 ANNUALLY spent on injections that would change their lives for permanent health conditions that affect their day to day life, will possibly result in dementia, causing further strain on the NHS. They won't fund it. But they will fund IVF (different limits in different counties) costing thousands and thousands of pounds. They will fund certain surgeries.

No. Sorry, it's wrong. We either all start paying a lot more and it does everything, or we pay the same and the NHS stops doing certain things, or there is total and utter root and branch new system.

Herat
But I don't get why privatisation is seen as such a demon.

Because privatisation means someone creaming profits of it - it's always going to cost more, or provide a worse service, if all the money isn't ploughed stright back into the service.

Privatisation hasn't really worked for other things, has it?

Too many freeloaders taking advantage of the NHS. If you work and therefore contribute your entitlement level of care should remain as it is at the moment, if you don't contribute (unless you're a child or disabled etc) then you should be entitled to an absolute bare minimum.

If we stopped cutting Corp tax so that ever increasing dividends could be paid to shareholders.
Or if we stopped the likes of Amazon or Starbucks opting out of paying tax.

Either of those would mean enough to fund the NHS.

@zaalitje if you have a pension then you are a shareholder or what do you think are some of the main financial things pension funds invest in?

Ridiculous proposal, the NHS just needs running properly, more money is not going to solve the problem.

Rubbish. No government has ever managed to magically change how the NHS is run so that it doesn't cost much. Every other developed country apart from the US has a public healthcare system. The US system is outrageously expensive and has poorer outcomes.

I honeztlh believe "free at the point of use" has had its day. Id be happy with a healthcare system modelled on those in France/Germany. Ive also heard good things about the systems in Australia and Singapore but dont know enough about them to comment. A USA style system would be awful (for all except the rich) but there are alternatives.

We need to look at how we use the NHS to. Getting pissed and falling over and breaking your leg is carelessness and should be invoiced.

Just look at and A and E on a Saturday night.

70 million of us, infrastructure for 50 million. Need more infrastructure, either send all the forriners home and stop breeding or get real and pay more tax.

As a nation we piss away fortunes on booze, brickphones, clothes etc etc. There's quite a high personal allowance and a tax rise won't hurt.

and with inflation at 5% or greater you are paying it anyway, you just haven't noticed.

What won't work is nhs contracts being taken up by the likes of Virgincare. My son's care has been all over the place since they won the contract in our area - medical paediatrics (nhs) saying that medications should be provided by community paediatrics (Virgincare)....despite my son not seeing a community paediatrician. His therapists from birth changing and appointments being held in awkward places we can't get to (under NHS they were nearly all in the same place). He has been discharged from services we (and other professionals) still believe are necessary (and friends of his with complex needs have been discharged altogether). He has had referrals taking an age or not arriving at all (we have been waiting 18 months for one, with still nothing). We have difficulties in getting through to the relevant service and there has been a complete lack of communication between the NHS elements and the Virgincare elements.

It is a fucking shit show, and I don't know why it isn't a national scandal that over 400 social care and children's services (including medical care, physiotherapy, speech and language, occupational therapy, school nursing, continence services, learning disability services etc) that support some of the most vulnerable in society, are being contracted out to Virgincare.

I fear for his future under the fractured system we are under now.

It always amuses me with these threads where people refuse to listen to the facts (a bit like Brexiters). The NHS is, by every measure, underfunded. Both as a proportion of GDP, and relative to population (both thanks to ageing and immigration).

The current system of pooled risk means that, statistically, most MN posters will be better off. The MAJORITY of UK citizens are net recipients from the system, particularly women, older people, and those with children.

Furthermore, what people fail to grasp is that any other system will cost more. Not jsut because of 'profit', but also administration, inequity, economies of scale, wage inflation etc etc.

I work in the sector on an international basis. Despite what you 'may have heard', the Australian system is actually in crisis, partly due to horrendous wage inflation (Orthopods earning $4m a year), and partly due to underfunding of the state sector. Equally, a number of our continental peers are now approaching crisis, thanks to slow economic growth, underfunding and demographics.

The nonsense horror stories dreamt up by the Daily Heil about NHS waste are usually either fabrications, or misunderstandings by the economically illiterate tabloid press. There are incidences of waste, but the same goes for every healthcare system. In fact, the NHS is officially ranked as the most efficient in the developed world (albet certainly not the best).

I am just repeating this, in its entirety, because it's someone talking very good sense on Mumsnet (some kind of record in itself), and is therefore bound to get lost in the maelstrom of posters frothing at the mouth:

"The proposal is not 4% tax increase each year for 14 years. The analysis suggests that we need to increase spending on the NHS by 4% year on year for 15 years if we want to improve the service.
We spend much less on the NHS than all of the alternative systems that people point to cost. US healthcare spending per person is three times what we spend on the NHS, for example."

I do think we need to pay more in tax, however, and that this burden should fall on those who have the most to spare over a basic standard of living (myself included).

Also, well said babycham.

Australian Medicare isn't in crisis. It's the cost of healthcare insurance that is pushing families as it's becoming a huge extra cost to family budgets.

Australian's pay a tax on their wages for medicare. There is a rebate paid when you visit a doctor so if the visit is $60 you get around $30 back. In some surgeries it is 'bulk billed' and you pay nothing as the government pays the GP.

Most Australian's will either have health insurance or pay for their GP out of their own pocket and will only use bulk billed surgeries for the usual pill repeat subscription, etc as you are (like the GPs here ) pushed in and out quick .

France and the rest of Europe seem to have a much better health service.

I lived in Germany for a while and roughly 15% of my gross pay went onto health insurance (the 'state' type of insurance, not private). What you pay is what you get.

You want a better health service not pay for it? doesn't work like that, I am afraid.

@Purple; Australian Medicare is facing a major financial shortfall. They're already instituting many of the schemes that the NHS has in order to ration care and deliver 'efficiencies'. The punters aren't complaining yet because they haven't noticed it, but they soon will.

Under Labour chancellor Gordon Brown, the Basic Rate of Income Tax was further reduced in stages to 20% by 2007. As the basic rate stood at 35% in 1976, it has been reduced by 43% since then.
although this was offset somewhat by increase in NI and VAT - it should be clear that historically income tax rates have been much higher than the current 20%.
I remember working full time and paying the 35% income tax rates.

Maybe it is time to introduce an NHS levy of 2% increase in the income tax rate (lower paid workers will not be massively affected)
The second thing that should happen is that all non-emergency/vanity or non-essential treatment should be paid for - I include in that IVF, ELCS, no free prescriptions for anyone (but a reasonable cost for everyone and the option to buy long term medication at a cheap rate)', and a low charge for each GP appointment that is not kept (ditto hospital appts).
Social care needs to pick up the slack and free up hospital beds (earmarked funding from central government and consistent across the country) with those who can pay should pay (although that cost the Conservatives votes in the last GE - it made a lot of sense)

Oh - and charge for non-uk residents at the going rate (or claim on their travel insurance) including expats who come over for 'free treatment'

But Saison4, employees NI contributions are at 12% of gross pay with employer contributions at 13.8% (albeit with a lower earnings limit, much like the personal allowance), so not dissimilar?

I don't know what the answer is, but I think while we keep telling ourselves that the NHS isn't working, is stressed, isn't fit for purpose, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If my employer was telling me day in day out (and it was all over the press every day) that my company was failing, I'd find my job pretty demotivating. As one of the largest employers in the world, I can't help but think we're just running it into the ground by being constantly negative.

I suspect over time, as people's perceptions of the NHS shift, more and more will take out private health insurance, and perhaps the private health insurance model will change as well. This may then free up some resources for the NHS, easing the pressure somewhat...

Emma

all in all, I paid a lot more in tax and NI when working over there. my take home pay was about 50%. here in the UK, my net pay is on a similar salary about 70%.

most European countries have far higher levels of income tax/NI than the UK and it is obvious when it comes to public services.

The NHS needs to reevaluate what it should be offering and should scrap the provision of lifestyle treatments such as IVF and weight-loss surgery. It would also be worth looking at whether certain parts of routine healthcare such as standard optometry that is available commercially at little cost would be better off completely in the private sector with no state subsidy (If Specsavers are willing to offer working adults free eye tests why are the NHS paying them to do the same for other groups). The postcode lottery also needs to stop with funding decisions being made centrally (which should also significantly reduce the number of people employed making such decisions) and free prescriptions being abolished in Scotland and for pensioners, children, and those with long term health conditions (in all honesty the list of conditions that qualifies is arbitrary in any case) who can afford to pay.

Dreary I agree, I think that only under 18s should get free prescriptions. A PPC costs £104 a year and bearing in mind that half of us are predicted to get cancer at some stage in our life and require chemo (plus all the 'normal' everyday prescriptions) it looks like a bloody bargain to me. And I think that GPs should hold clinics for long term chronic conditions/blood tests etc which are free and charge maybe a fiver for all other appointments (again under 18s should be free).

The main problem is that a lot of people don't value anything they get for free (or in the case of my ILs they think they've paid in all their lives so of course everything should be free when the amount of tax they've paid in their lifetime wouldn't cover a fraction of the cost of the care that they've received in the last couple of years alone). I don't know what the answer is but I think chucking more money at the NHS won't solve its problems. It needs a drastic overhaul but no party has the nerve to do it because it would be political suicide.

Dreary - there is already the option to buy long term meds cheaply by using an annual card at £104.

The problem with charging for missed appointments is what happens with dementia patients who forget? Or patients who can’t get to the appointment due to an emergency hospital admission? Or when the trains don’t run and the motorway is shut?

By charging for appointments (even if the money can be refunded later) there will be people who will decide not to seek medical help when they need it because they can’t afford to. It’s an effective way to reduce the population in poorer areas!

Example of waste. My 90 year old mother who is a very anxious lady, has called the ambulance service 4 times since Easter (and her doctor every day!). There is nothing medically wrong with her, but they are obliged to take her in for assessment due to her age and a history of heart B/P issues. So she goes in, has every test, has her drugs re-assessed, they are all BINNED, and re-issued on discharge. So 4 times, over four weeks, she has used the NHS, had all the same tests, repeated every time, additionally she has had an angiogram but then they decide no to treat as she is too old to cope, so what was the point. Most appallingly she has had her medication renewed every single time. Often she has just had her repeat prescriptions, so the boxes are a couple of weeks supply. Apparently it is the rules. She hates going in, and has also self-discharged twice....... the care she gets is great, and I know in part it is her "fault", but the costs of caring for her (and I suspect many other elderlys) are astonishing.