To ask you to choose between the NHS and subsidising energy bills?

[PersonaNonGarter]

We all know that our DCs are going to be paying off all of this government borrowing until the end of time. The country’s in debt and Liz Truss is about to borrow more.

So if you had to choose, would you borrow more for the NHS?

YABU - the NHS has enough, deal with energy crisis
YANBU - the NHS is the priority always

In a perfect world everyone would get a pay rise, and there would be no energy crisis. I am very in favour of that.

They’ve already done it, I think. There was a windfall tax. They might do another.

There are many things the government spends/wastes money on besides the NHS, but it's always used as it's the most emotive.

Energy has to be the priority. We can see exactly where it’s spent. I’m an NHS nurse (North East hospital) and can assure you that the waste of money in the NHS is HUGE. We all see it daily. The NHS is well funded, but we just need a public debate about how the money is spent.

Also the biggest threat to the NHS is the critical shortage of healthcare staff, pay restoration for junior doctors and rises for other staff who have had a real time pay cut in recent years is vital if we want it to continue functioning. Before the whataboutery begins yes plenty of people 'deserve' a payrise, but I think a lot are ignorant as to how dire the staffing situation is and how much worse it's going to get. People leave to locum or work privately as its more money, these aren't greedy people- wages are still below many countries but its better. The NHS is nothing without sufficient staff, if people aren't behind rises for staff then they can't be that arsed about continuing to access healthcare free at point of access.

Is it well funded? What HUGE waste of money do you see? Interesting you're involved in procurement too. Not saying its perfect of course and yes there's wastage, but this gets trotted out a lot and curious as to what wastage people mean when they say it.

Exactly, the government need to act to reduce the power bills, at least by removing VAT and other taxes (climate change levy etc), so people don't need as much govt support to be able to pay their bills. They also need to bring in some kind of law/rule to reduce the bills in other ways, i.e. scrap the standing charges.

Just throwing more money at people will just, as you say, allow the energy firms to raise bills even more, and will stoke inflation as many people don't need money thrown at them. Have we learned nothing from Sunak's covid support scattergun approach of throwing money at people who don't need it whilst excluding millions who did - it helped drive our current inflation and national debt problems!

And a public debate on how its spent- how on earth do you propose that works?

Or how about we stop subsidising the fossil fuel industry and start investing in renewable energy so we all have a future?

it isn’t either ore!! And how about we invest in the NHS ?

The richest people made trillions in profit during the pandemic. The money is there. The solutions are there. Just we are allowing for a rich few to keep it all and decide where investments are made

Wish this myth about the country’s finances being run like a household’s wasn’t so enduring. Government debt doesn’t need to be paid off. Do you think we’re all paying our taxes aiming for some day when the country is “debt free”? Most of the money “borrowed” is for grand capital schemes (building schools and hospitals, cross rail, hs2, etc.) built under pfi or tender (which usually massively overrun, almost as if they’re set up that way).
I think it’s a convenient story to sell to the public that they can readily understand, while funnelling borrowed money into the coffers of private companies.

The NHS is a money pit and needs a complete overhaul.

@PersonaNonGarter
Some the responses here are bizarre. Difficult financial decisions are going to have to be taken.
Ok, I wasn’t expecting a thread of economics geeks but so many people seem to reject the idea that public funds might be finite.

You have phrased the question as being "either/or" - which it quite obviously isn't. It doesn't take an economics geek to point out the flaw in your proposition.

The government spends money in multiple areas, so the finite public funds are not just spent on NHS or energy. Personally I would rather that public funds were spent on both rather than the millions spaffed on a "Festival of Brexit" that nobody attended, or on useless PPE bought from friends and contacts of the Conservatives (£ billions), or on building new Customs infrastructure and new certification systems that were not needed before Brexit (£40 billion and rising) or on Johnson's Air Spaff One and Two private jets ... etc. But that's just my view.

personally I don't think we should be loading anymore debt on the younger generations not least because they are rapidly shrinking! We need some kind of wealth tax so we are all paying more not just those on PAYE. Use the revenue generated to invest in solar panels etc for schools & hospitals & homes. Reform the NHS for a European model.

My OH is a cancer patient. We have tens of thousands of pounds of expensive prescription drugs that OH doesn't use, sat in our cupboards. One tablet costs over a thousand pounds per tablet according to the NHS website. He has 1 per month (expensive chemotherapy tablet) but the prescription is for 3 per month. Another chemo tablet costs £300 per tablet and he is prescribed 21 per month but only uses 11. That's on top of loads of other cheaper tablets he gets prescribed monthly but never uses such as anti-sickness, anti-diarrhoea, and also drugs he uses occasionally but gets a monthly supply every month such as omeprozol. That's at least £5,000 per month of drugs issued to him that he doesn't take!

So why don't you stop asking for them, I hear you say? He's tried, believe me, he's tried. Apparently it's an automatic prescription issued by the haematologist and the oncology dept. He doesn't "tick the boxes" like a normal GP prescription request. He's asked his consultant to reduce the quantity of drugs issued on the prescription - the consultant has said it's "too hard" to change as it's a pre-ordained, pre-approved treatment plan and would need some kind of permission from "whoever" approves his treatment, which would take a lot of time and even a meeting to get approval (apparently this is needed every time there's a change in treatment for long term cancer patients). Consultant glibly said "it's ok" because the oncology dept have got funding for the normal prescription so it's not costing them anything (the dept that is, not the NHS as a whole!). Pharmacy won't take them back to re-use and won't issue less than the prescription, so if he took them back to pharmacy, they'd destroy them).

We've pointed all this out to the consultant, who's reply was, just keep them and rotate them to stop them going out of date, as one day, "they", whoever "they" is, may stop authorising and paying for the treatment, so it would be handy to have plenty spare so OH could continue having the tablets for a while after his treatment officially stops!

The whole thing is madness. OH has been on this treatment regime for a few years now, and the last time we counted, we must have something like £40k of tablets in our cupboard! We're powerless to stop them being issued.

A bigger worry, though, is that on the NHS records, it will show him as having more tablets than he actually taking, so if he were admitted to hospital, or suffered some kind of medical emergency, his "records" aren't showing the true picture and unless he or I were able to tell the paramedics or doctors what tablets he was actually taking, wrong emergency treatment decisions could be taken!

For those saying the NHS wastes money, please can you give real life examples,?

im not saying there isn’t wastage by any means, but it’s easy to trot out a Daily Mail headline - I’m interested to know where you think that wastage is so we can have a debate about the truth in the statement.

For example, it is easy to throw out the “too many middle managers” line but please only comment if you actually know what role those people are currently fulfilling and what you think is wrong about that - not because it’s something a newspaper once said.

I agree. In the UK, we spend, per person, just $179 per year less on healthcare than France, who have a generally accepted much better healthcare system. Would we get an equivalent quality healthcare system if we all paid another $179 per year in tax? Not a chance? It would go into the leaky bucket. We desperately need root and branch reform of the NHS, make it efficient, stop the waste, and then we can think about paying that $179 per year to get an equivalent system to the French!

oops! Missed the above sameish post! And good genuine example about the drugs OP.

Why can't the government take the massive profits of the energy companies through taxation, and give that money to fund the NHS? And pass legislation to massively lower the energy cap?
I know they won't but that way there would be enough for both.

The economy needs affordable energy, otherwise businesses will go under, jobs will be lost, exports will decrease, so the government will need to support increasing numbers of unemployed people with less money coming into the country.

Agreed. Thanks @Badbadbunny for your detailed post - so interesting. I think most people would be horrified if they knew about this. So wasteful.

The NHS has such a revered place in British life, but the reality is it isn’t as good as it should be. And politicians from all parties feel that they can’t say that cos people get so huffy.

They’ve already done this once - windfall tax. Rishi Sunak gave out £9billion in April.

You didn’t notice? Nope, very few people did because the scale of the crisis is so huge.

Absolutely this.

My generation has just finished paying for the Second World War so I don't fundamentally see government debt as a bad thing

Government debt isn't like household debt fundamentally as government is responsible for creating money - money is the only resource that is fundamentally infinite

They NHS may be wasteful to you but in terms of outcomes per pound spent it is one of the best in the world - and if it could full it's vacancies we would have far fewer horror stories

Yes an extra 11 billion into the NHS would be very effective if they could recruit - oops brexit didn't help that either did it - and neither does a load of nhs haters spouting off on social media

Which means training more doctors and paying staff well and treating them as humans not angels or robots

Bashing the NHS without actually coming up with a better solution is .... just hate and greed dressed up with no knickers

The tories need to fix the nhs and sort out fuel bills not winge like spoilt brats that it's too hard and too expensive l

We have an huge demographic issue though with an ageing population & not even younger people to support that. Plus immigration isn't particularly popular.

not enough