To think the NHS will eventually have to be privatised ?

[Felixsmama]

When the NHS was founded 1 in 2 people died before the age of 65. It's now 1 in 8, the last 10 years of people's lives can be spent with multiple co-morbid conditions which are expensive to treat and keep under control. The NHS wasn't designed for what it's not having to do, we have an aging population. Shouldn't we start to have conversations about what going forward our health service should look like? There's multiple models not just the US one.

I am UK born to UK parents who moved away when I was a child. Though when I see my tax each month and I have massive portions taken off, I wonder where it's all going of course 😩🙃

Of course it needs to be privatised - it's needed that for decades but successive Governments have been too scared. Let's look at Switzerland, France, Holland, Germany - they make it work, so why can't the UK? Let's get rid of all the sentimentality about the NHS and be realistic.

@EcoEcoIA & you think they will vote for that?

In France, with many times more nurses than the UK, a typical nurse will earn 35k euros, thats on par with UK nurse pay.Nurse pay in UK is similar to most EU countries

I believe in France housing is on average 20% cheaper & so is childcare.

Exactly, what's the cut off? So work more get taxed more and then get told if you need hospital or healthcare tough unless you pay?!

Total tax money spent on the NHS will be lower because people with assets will have to use them to pay for their healthcare.

the people with the assets tend to be older, they won't vote for it, nor will their dc who want to inherit to get on the ladder. I don't know what the solution is.

@thejall I doubt that "they" (people with assets) will vote for that. But they are not a majority.

or won't be a majority for much longer.

The PROBLEM, is that the demand on the UK health system now outstrips the number of trained doctors and nurses in the UK workforce. The population seeking care, has outstripped the health infrastructure serving it .

If every NHS hospital was privatised, they STILL wouldn't have enough medical staff , beds, carehomes to discharge patients to. If every doctor and nurse was paid double, there still wouldn't be enough of them. If someone built a million state of the art hospital beds, there'd still not be enough hospitals in the UK to put them in, and not enough medical staff to treat and look after the occupants.

Yep and it's only going to get worse we are facing a demographic time bomb. I believe they will bring in assisted dying legislation not because they want to give people choice but to save money and care costs.

@EcoEcoIA 49% of the population is over 40, obviously not all will have assets but only 29% are 18-39. And we now have more over 65s than under 15s so it will continue to widen.

@2bazookas it's scary

@thejall that's why we need immigration to rebalance the population.

Medical care has to be paid for. There are two ways of doing it.

1. Through Tax and NI


2. Through people paying for it directly

The latter is more expensive overall because you also pay for staff to sell and administer insurance policies, to bill and collect co-pay and deal with debts. You also pay what the market will bear so some costs will go up.

Privatising the NHS is what many large private companies want as they know they will make a lot of money. There are firms currently putting a lot of money into lobbying for this.

No it just needs adequate investment. I live in Spain. The difference between the public health services here and the NHS are vast. Yes I pay a bit more tax and social security than I did in the UK but get so much more for it. I see a go the same day. , Can also email them and get a reply within an hour , I can book I to see a specialist without referral , after care is second to none and the mental health care is extraordinary.

We have one of the oldest populations in the world.

So no. It needs a socialist government

And the privatisation of public services that has already happened has not gone well. Even the privatisation of a far simpler service like the railways has been a disaster and the government has had to take some services back under the government at times.

In the healthcare sector, Circle totally fucked up the highly respected eye treatment centre in Nottingham when they took it over. It went from being a specialist centre under the NHS, to struggling to perform the most basic eye procedures. And in the process wasted a ton of NHS money.

I agree @Getoff I have no idea why you would charge for hospital stays instead of GP appointments.

The way it works in France is that the government subsidises 70% of the cost for GP appointments for everyone. This leaves about £20 left to pay for.

If you are on benefits or low income, the government pays that £20 for you.

Then what most people do is buy a mutuelle, a top-up health insurance policy. When we lived in France this was about £40/month for our family but it covered literally almost everything -- GP visits, prescriptions, hospital stays (even got you private rooms), dental, eyeglasses, physio, everything.

I know a lot of people in the UK would be viscerally unhappy with the idea of paying a monthly fee, but when you consider that it would cover things you currently pay for (dental, vision, prescriptions, various therapies) and hopefully improve overall quality, maybe it would be more acceptable?

Read a news item, or a clickbait filler about a Dr suggesting we should pay £8 per night in hospital and OAPs pay for prescriptions as others do.
If a genuine Dr that is unusual, very unusual.

Goes back more than 12 years. Blair spunked billions on PFI that we'll all be paying for decades, several times more than the actual costs of the hospitals if they'd been paid for outright.

I don't think any political party of the last few decades have had a clue about solving the NHS problems. Both parties have, at times, spunked money at it without control, and both have, at times, "corrected" the previous over-spending.

@EcoEcoIA of course but it's not popular is it?

You missed the third way which is an insurance backed state system, like they have in many countries in Europe, where insurance backs up a state system.

Yes we should pay more tax to pay for it but with the cost of housing and, for us personally, the cost of childcare is crippling without taking anymore off of our already low wages.

But that just increases costs. You need staff to design insurance policies and lawyers to deal with legal contracts, staff to sell and market insurance, then staff to take payments, collect co-pays, deal with debts, etc. Looks at how many staff the insurance industry already employs? It is a vast industry. I do not see how putting another layer of bureaucracy in place is seen as a good thing.

I left my job in the NHS a year ago, took a 25% pay cut - to save my own sanity.

I don’t have answers to the big questions here, but I do know that money was definitely misspent (IMHO) on middle management and structuring, and also we were constantly advertising. No one applied for the posts. People hear of the working conditions and wisely go elsewhere. We had a massive underspend every year.

Fine, if you refund me the 40+ plus years of contributions I’ve already made (and am continuing to make).