Private education and healthcare

[LeafUsAlone]

I'm just curious as to why they are considered morally indefensible when people being able to afford better quality clothing, houses, safer cars etc aren't commented on in the same way?

Considering both private healthcare and education doesn't necessarily mean a better quality, why do people get so annoyed over them?

@ThePure there isn’t a fixed amount of teacher or surgeon time - both can be increased or decreased depending on the incentives/ disincentives. Removing the opportunity to work in the private sector doesn’t guarantee those people will stay in state/public sector -both teachers and medical professionals are leaving in droves because of state sector dysfunction. The private sector captures some of that, keeping them in the country doing the work they were trained to do. Or in the case of medical professionals provides them with incentives to work more than they might otherwise as many of those part time doctors would not go full time if their private practice was shuttered. Penalising them for working less than full time nhs is also not likely to go the way you hope- those that are able to would likely just abandon the nhs entirely, further reducing nhs capacity.

I'm a Dr. I know a lot more about the healthcare side of the argument than about education but I assume that it is analogous ie that teachers also use state resources to be trained then go and work in the private sector. It takes less time to train a teacher than a dr though.

Lots of people use hard-earn savings to pay for operations they would have to wait for on the NHS. This saves them potentially years of living with pain and ensures they are, for the most part, able to work and continue contributing to the system. What part of feeling the need to pay for something that could be free if you can wait long enough is privilege?

I think there actually is a pretty fixed amount of surgeon time. I don't think the numbers can be increased so easily and certainly not quickly as it takes 15-20 years to fully train a consultant surgeon.

There are caps on the numbers at medical school each year which is to do with the numbers that the NHS can train thereafter as medical school is just the start of becoming a useful Dr.

If the private sector takes more and more surgeon time then how can it be replaced when we have only trained the amount the NHS needs and can afford to train?

The only way it can be replaced is by getting Drs from abroad and post pandemic and Brexit we have less of those.

This is why we are now seeing so many medical jobs being done by nurses, paramedics but that just makes shortages of those professionals so it has created a demand for these new physicians assistant roles which are poorly trained Drs on the cheap and have led to deaths in some hospitals.

So yes you can disincentivise it and drive Drs away and that has certainly happened but it's not at all so easy to get them back as the supply is artificially limited.

Exactly this.

I've used private healthcare, and I would again. I'd also use private education for my children if it became apparent the available state options were inadequate.

Does that make me a hypocrite? Sure. My desire to live a long life and for my children to have a good start to their lives exceeds the strength of my moral convictions on these subjects.

But surely I can still acknowledge that I feel it's a sign of a badly functioning society that I'm able to do these things - I don't believe that anyone should not be able to access healthcare due to lack of funds.

I think if everything was working as it should, people would find it less morally offensive. It doesn't feel like a big deal if someone goes private to shave a short amount of time off an already short waiting list, or to access non essential treatments. But when people are dying on waiting lists it is awful that the rich can pay to bypass this and the poor can't.

but here there are no NHS dentists only private in entire city.

post got garbled - waiting list here are also ridiculous long to point it was in news local kids have waited so long for operations they are now inoperable.

Better state services will remove some of the private interest - and honestly I'd prefer that as focus rather than bitching about people paying to opt out of seriously poor services by private rather than playing postcode lottery.

Then you force people to live in certain areas so that you don’t get a buildups of successful pupils in schools and make sure they are evenly distributed.

Saltines - how do you ‘force’ people to live in certain areas? Do you forcibly remove them from where they are living perfectly happily and make them go elsewhere? Do you also ‘force’ people to live in a house designated by whoever is making these rules?
Sounds like a pretty grim regime to me.

I think Saltines are as being sarcastic

This. Private healthcare is no longer for the elite, it is for ordinary people who just want to be able to get on with their lives and continue to contribute to society. Private hospitals now offer finance plans - 10 years ago this would’ve been unheard of and laughed about but it is a sad reflection of how bad things now are within the NHS.

No body here has called for an immediate dismantling of these private services and nobody is claiming an immediate dismantling would improve public service.

Didimum several people have said they want private education abolished. If they want it abolished why wouldn’t they want it dismantled immediately?

Oh ok. Apologies in that case.

Most sensible post I've read on this subject. But your wasting your breath (or whatever the equivalent of energy spent on typing is). These threads always go the same way. Point out that people going private is the RESULT of unequal services all you like, people will still keep insisting that it's the CAUSE. Because apparently only wealthy people have "easy to educate" kids. Everyone's else's kids are a nightmare without these well-off kids in the classroom looking out for them. 😂

Because a decent education and access to good healthcare should be rights not privileges. Money should not be able to buy you access to better quality learning or care.
We have a right to an acceptable standard of living, that is different. Obviously more money buys you a higher one. Thats the kind of privilege that money should be able to buy.

That is what is such a sad thing
Private healthcare used to be just a niche thing that people used for boob jobs and the like and now it's mainstream for things that people used to get done on the NHS.
I don't judge people who have the money using it to pay to jump the queue. I just want people to be aware that there are losers when you do that. The people who have no resources at all to pay.
You don't 'free up a place' for them as many people think you actually encourage more staff to defect to the private sector to meet that demand and you bring closer the total destruction of the NHS. If you are a Tory voter that probably makes you happy anyway but it makes me very sad.
The day my hospital gets taken over by a private company I will leave. I will never work in the private sector to line the pockets of shareholders. I will have to see if I can find a charity to work for when that happens
If you think that is alarmist many many NHS services have now been quietly farmed out to the private sector like all drugs and alcohol services and community physio in many places. I have not found that this improved the services for staff or patients.

Of course there is constraint on supply - my point is it isn’t fixed and it isn’t interchangeable between state and private. Trained medical professionals of all stripes are leaving the nhs (moving abroad, retiring early, reducing hours) because it is a stressful, dysfunctional place to work. Some of them find an outlet in the private sector, but if that were to be removed or disincentivised don’t assume all that capacity would go back to the NHS. Much of it would simply be lost, reducing healthcare resourcing overall.

The rise of the private sector is both a cause AND an effect of the deterioration of public services.

All this jabbering. Honestly, we can afford to go private, it's our preference, so we just do it because we live in a free country. Honestly, I'd feel bad having the government pay for us when we can fund ourselves. We pay large amounts of taxes which we don't begrudge one bit. The schools and NHS locally are perfectly fine. We have friends with posh holidays, living in nice houses in good catchment areas and we know they judge us. But that's their preference. I don't see their choice as morally better than us at all. Personally I think everyone should be given an allowance for schooling and you spend it how you want and top up as much as you want. That would give more choice and ultimately more money into schools overall and that money distributed more widely. I'm not ideological about health care - can't see what's wrong with a mix and match system.

My experience is that some of it is interchangeable though

People can't afford to stop working altogether most of us need to replace the income (those with privately educated kids all the more so) and moving abroad is a huge upheaval so far fewer Drs would make those choices than to move to private.

It has got much easier to work in the private sector than it used to be practically and morally and now that everyone is at it you honestly feel a fool if you don't! People can't believe I don't have a private practice.

I just want the balance redressed a bit and for people to come back and help us dig the NHS out of the hole it is in rather than fleeing for the easy money. Surely there must be some way to achieve that with regulation? I would personally dismantle the whole thing yes but I am not realistically expecting that to happen (then again I would have voted for Jeremy Corbyn. I realise my views are a bit niche in this day and age but I genuinely hold them and live by them)

@Barbadossunset I was being equal parts sarcastic and serious proving the point that you can’t force what @ThePure wants without forcing other life choices in the name ‘equal’

The absolutely most scandalous monetisation/privatisation is in children's social care. The vast majority of children's homes and socialist placements are owned by private companies. Tax payers money is going towards dividends so that people can provide an often awful service to abused and vulnerable children. Private equity companies are making money out of looked after children. It's a disgrace.
In health private companies cream off the profitable/easy bits and leave the rest to the NHS whilst taking the staff (that we paid to train).

If you pay taxes and have children who you educate privately, you are opting out of using state education. Whether it’s available to you or not is irrelevant. It obviously saves the government money to have people opting out too because nobody hears about small class sizes, unused building capacity and underworked teachers do they.

Healthcare is different. Private healthcare reduces your burden on the NHS rather than completely removing it.

@ThePure you can’t force people back to the NHS, though. I work in a healthcare adjacent business and at least 1/3 of our staff are trained doctors who just couldn’t cope anymore in practice. I am constantly bombarded by enquiries from doctors desperate to exit medicine. The thing is, while it looks good to our clients, a medical background is totally unnecessary to our work, so it is an utter waste of their training. Surely it is better that they are practicing medicine somewhere? Surely a day or two per week for NHS is better than none?

It's not that the well behaved children have to manage the badly behaved children. You have well behaved children and you have disruptive children, then you you have a lot of children that can be influenced either way. I have seen it time and again where a child will be disruptive in a class where the balance favours disruptive behaviour but the same child will behave well when the the balance favours good behaviour. The more well behaved children there are in the class, the more well behaved the other children are.

But why is it the ‘good’ kids responsibility to do do this?

Yes. And it is cool that I disagree with people and they disagree with me. That’s democracy. Democracy is cool 👍

I thought you were testing my jargon. Literally nobody speaks like that.

my CV for understanding is a couple of degrees in politics and political economy and I work in public affairs 🤷‍♀️ It doesn’t make my opinion more valid, but it does mean I don’t need to be patronised with your bullshit bingo posts stuffed with unnecessary policy wank.