Would you pay an additional tax for the NHS?

[Whatisthis543]

I’m torn on this one, surely our taxes should cover a well funded NHS but it seems that they don’t...

Is that systematic I.e too much bureaucracy and poor allocation of resources (within the trusts and elsewhere) or is there genuinely not enough money with an ageing population and rapid growth?

No need. I'm sure that Boris promised an extra £350 million a week saved as a result of Brexit to be given to boost funding for the NHS. He even plastered it on the side of a bus didn't he? Looking forward to seeing that first £350mill at the end of this week

I speak as an accountant who worked in the NHS for nearly 20 years and I would not be happy to pay additional tax. It’s naive to think more money will magically solve the NHS’s problems, it needs a total restructure.

I think we agree that there aren’t 40,000 fully trained nurses sitting around waiting to return to the NHS with no better options. The question was, how do you plug the gap. Not how do you immediately magic up 40,000 nurses to start work on Monday!

Nail on head!
We currently plug the gap with overseas staff/agency to address the immediate needs, the urgency to train and pay our own students to train vanishes and this is what has been happening for many years.

We also have shortages in more specialist areas.

Retail staff can have A levels. I bet that many do

Can't base policy on bets and speculation, they'd also need to be relevant A levels, my DD needed english and a science.
Without that, foundation course.

Root n branch reform of training and bonuses is needed, with a 10 year, funded, plan to train staff, free training in return for a min amount of time in NHS, significant pay rises, starting pay of £30k, which what an Aus nurse starts on, with increases of 4 to 5% every year.

Even before qualifying, DD approached by Aus agency.

No I wouldn't be happy to pay further tax. The NHS doesn't seem to be efficiently using the money it has already.
I also feel that I pay a lot into the system without much rewards...I don't have children, I haven't been to the doctor in a long time, I can't get a NHS dentist, the idea of ever getting a pension seems to move further and further away each year. I would object to paying yet more in.

@flattyres

cattenburg, self referral is working fine in other countries such as Germany. why wouldn't it here.

This.

I agree.

A lot of GP appointments are a waste of time due to GP gatekeeping, and people are now wasting appointments by "logging" problems. Example - Dave injures his back, books an emergency GP appointment asap to log his back injury. It's because he knows if he waits to see if his back gets better before going to the GP, he'll be told to go away for two weeks/a month to see if it gets better before going back. If Dave knew he could book an appointment with a chiropractor in a couple of weeks if his back wasn't any better it would avoid this.

Root n branch reform of training and bonuses is needed, with a 10 year, funded, plan to train staff, free training in return for a min amount of time in NHS, significant pay rises, starting pay of £30k, which what an Aus nurse starts on, with increases of 4 to 5% every year.

With respect, that’s not going to happen.

The average cost of living in Australia is, according to the sources I’ve seen, 20% higher than in the U.K. So why would we pay equivalent salaries to UK nurses?

4% to 5% annual pay rises for everyone in the public sector - because you couldn’t confine it just to the nursing profession, or just the NHS - are absolutely not going to happen. Even if we weren’t having to pay for a pandemic!

@Iamthewombat

Root n branch reform of training and bonuses is needed, with a 10 year, funded, plan to train staff, free training in return for a min amount of time in NHS, significant pay rises, starting pay of £30k, which what an Aus nurse starts on, with increases of 4 to 5% every year.

With respect, that’s not going to happen.

The average cost of living in Australia is, according to the sources I’ve seen, 20% higher than in the U.K. So why would we pay equivalent salaries to UK nurses?

4% to 5% annual pay rises for everyone in the public sector - because you couldn’t confine it just to the nursing profession, or just the NHS - are absolutely not going to happen. Even if we weren’t having to pay for a pandemic!

I didn't say it would happen but unless we make nursing and other HCP jobs more attractive, then put up with an understaffed NHS, staff sickness and resignations....simple equation.

With shortages of Teachers, the govt came up with more money, more than nursing and 32k in inner London, 29k outer London, 26k everywhere else, no shift work or dealing with people dying on you or getting attacked in AE on a friday night.

My BiL lives in Aus, he would question the living expenses, certainly on par with London and the SE, then there is the weather.

There are two main reasons that tax revenue isn't high enough:

1. Tax credits. The government are paying benefits to working people because their employers don't pay them a proper living wage. So basicially, tax revenue is being used to subsidise huge corporations and make lots of dosh for their shareholders.

1. Again, huge corporations who pay no corporation tax in this country, eg Amazon, Facebook etc.

Facebook paid £29m in U.K. corporation tax last year. Amazon paid £293m of U.K. corporation tax last year.

Unless you get every tax jurisdiction in the world collaborating on transfer pricing, you can’t force businesses to pay more tax because you think that they should. Do you know how much US corporation tax Amazon and Facebook pay? That’s where they are headquartered.

Until this utopian world exists (clue: never) then if we want public services to improve in the U.K. we’ll have to pay more income tax.

As per @ComtesseDeSpair DH works for the NHS it often doesn’t need more money just a complete strategic overhaul, where we do need more money and which would positively impact how efficiently the NHS would be able to run is social care. I would be more than happy with paying more tax knowing it went into better social care. Both of the elderly and chronic conditions.

It’s not just Amazon and Facebook.

It’s every single company who gets away with paying minimum wage and then the state has to top it up with UC.

Fuck that. When they start paying properly then we can all pay more. But also not until the NHS has been reformed and the mindless waste has been sorted out.

Yet the NHS scores highly in international comparisons on efficiency.

We fund the NHS, on avg, about 1 to 2% less p.a than the EU avg, over 20 years, thats a very significant amount, beds, nurses, scanners, Dr's, GP's we have less than comparable EU countries.

Maybe they do.

I know what I see.

Amazon here in Ireland offers €12 an hour to start and increments every 6 months. Minimum wage here €10.20 🤷‍♀️

What do they pay in the U.K.??

The NHS prior to the internal market was so efficient that we would regularly get insurance company bigwigs from the US coming over to see how we did it so cheaply.

The current internal market was created at great expense purely to make privatisation possible. We now get sold the lie that it is unsustainable. Purely to dismantle it.

Do not fall for the lie. Our country CAN afford an NHS, particularly if the private sector is not allowed to parasitise it by taking on the money-making procedures, whilst shipping over their failures, or long-term injuries and other exclusions, to the NHS. Additionally, the private sector trains no-one - although yes, they do sometimes now do student placements - but they are paid for doing them, from the public purse.

I pay less in tax than many people in the US on similar incomes pay in a combination of tax and private healthcare costs. Obviously the US model is particularly inefficient, but I am also confident that the inefficiencies of the NHS have been talked up by the right wing press since there has been an NHS. I'd be perfectly happy for a genuinely independent commission to review whether some European single payer universal insurance model could be better though.

I would gladly pay more tax so that health and care services could be properly funded. I fear some use the idea that the NHS is wasteful as an excuse for not funding it properly.

It seems to me that some of the worst waste, such as fleets of ambulances sitting outside hospitals unable to hand patients over, is caused by underfunding and not by a fat bloated organisation swimming in money.

Taxes have been raised by previous governments under the auspices of being for "the NHS" so as to make the loss of income an easier pill to swallow. The reality is that little improvement is seen in services for a number of reasons.
Political parties cannot agree to a consensus of how to invest and manage the service so they each waste money when in poeer to then have changes, ideas and agendas reversed by the next government wasting money and achieving no gains.
The public's opinion of what the NHS should provide is continually growing - gender reassignments, gastric bands, excessive skin removal, treatment for self inflicted ailments through bad lifestyle choices.
The cost of drugs, treatment, and legal settlements is continually increasing.

The system is broken and needs to be adjusted for todays society. Free health is not free if you pay astronomical taxes each month. A private health policy would likely cost less for most middle to high earners.

I’d happily pay more tax to fund the NHS if the 2013 bill was repealed. The amount of money squandered on tendering services is a disgrace. And as for the red tape delaying the covid vaccination programme ...

and if this government is unwilling to close tax loopholes
@Deathgrip are they unwilling or unable? The tax system certainly needs simplifying (the yellow book is in five volumes these days, finance acts have doubled in length) but like with reducing bureaucracy it is just like trying to slay Hydra. You cut off a head and two more regrow.

Taxes have been raised by previous governments under the auspices of being for "the NHS" so as to make the loss of income an easier pill to swallow. The reality is that little improvement is seen in services for a number of reasons

When? UK doesn't use hypothecated taxation, no tax has ever been specifically for the NHS, all taxes go into the pot, then divided out.
Income tax has fallen from around 30% to 20% now, higher rate from 60 to 40%, something has to give in our aging population.

The nearest we've come to it is council tax, where some goes to fund social care but thats still not NHS, as SC is pretty much privatised now.

@jasjas1973

Taxes have been raised by previous governments under the auspices of being for "the NHS" so as to make the loss of income an easier pill to swallow. The reality is that little improvement is seen in services for a number of reasons

When? UK doesn't use hypothecated taxation, no tax has ever been specifically for the NHS, all taxes go into the pot, then divided out.
Income tax has fallen from around 30% to 20% now, higher rate from 60 to 40%, something has to give in our aging population.

The nearest we've come to it is council tax, where some goes to fund social care but thats still not NHS, as SC is pretty much privatised now.

Blair/Brown increased NIC twice under the headlines of "Saving the NHS".

@DdraigGoch

and if this government is unwilling to close tax loopholes *@Deathgrip* are they unwilling or unable? The tax system certainly needs simplifying (the yellow book is in five volumes these days, finance acts have doubled in length) but like with reducing bureaucracy it is just like trying to slay Hydra. You cut off a head and two more regrow.

Lots has been done in the last 10 years to clamp down on tax loopholes such as IR35, ATED, loan/trust tax avoidance schemes, additional taxes on dividends, etc.

I'd be happy to pay more taxes for social care and greater integration with the NHS - if we've learnt anything from this pandemic its the lack of care for the vulnerable, those in need or care and support. That would alleviate the pressure of the NHS, not just in the pandemic but also in normal times.

For all the massive injection of extra cash into the NHS for 10 years rom 1997 under the Blair government there was 1 percent improvement in efficiency and the biggest winners were doctors pay - hospital and GPs.

For all the massive injection of extra cash into the NHS for 10 years rom 1997 under the Blair government there was 1 percent improvement in efficiency and the biggest winners were doctors pay - hospital and GPs.

I’m ex-NHS. Very ex. I have spoken to some of the representatives of GP groups. They told me that they went into the negotiations with the Department of Health, headed by the then Labour health minister, Patricia Hewitt, prepared for a hard negotiation over remuneration. The other side went in with an offer far higher than they were planning to ask for: the GPs snapped their hands off!