We need to start charging for NHS services

[Fragmentedbrain]

£15 for the GP
£20 for A&E
NHS routes to paid-for fast track treatment
Options to pay for nicer rooms

We need to stop putting working people on disability benefits for want of a functioning health service it's barbaric

Agree. our local nhs A and E dept is usually full of romanian gypsies...entire families...wailing and yelling and screaming and dropping on the floor when a nurse or doctor passes....and then go back outside to smoke and eat kebabs etc....a nurse told us that most just want a free prescription !!

So what's going on? Surely that's completely unacceptable. To you and the GP.

Yeh hell lets privatise health...no way that could go wrong or the same way as... let me see: railways, water, electricity, gas and all the others. Duh, if you want good public services you have to pay for them through general taxation, and if that means redistributing wealth more fairly at the same time, so the weathiest/landed gentry pay considerably more, either through an annual wealth or inheritance tax, then so be it!

Of course it makes sense but good luck trying to get it implemented. The cries of "privatising the NHS" will deafen you!

I agree. It's the "NHS must always be free for all" that WILL be it's demise and is causing us to sleep walk into the US system. It's stopping us looking at other healthcare systems such as in Europe that actually work and are still affordable/free for the poorest. Until we change our mentality, the NHS will continue to decline until it's useless for everyone.

FREEBIES? a lot of us pay huge amounts in taxes. why do you think we pay these taxes? We are supposed to have good healthcare, a pension at a decent age just as the current pensioners have been getting some from 55-60 yrs old. Pension in this country has becone ponzy scheme.None of these are happening. More so the services are so appaling I have to pay on top privately to get the treatment I need. So no we are not getting freebies. Some people do. We pay way too much taxes for getting nothing for it.
All this boiling frog syndrome, starting to peddle rhetorics about not paying enough tax and then normalising it.
Why is nobody talking about how tax money are misused, wasted and roo easily subject to fraud.
Yes something has to be done and clearly we have one inept government after another. But you cannot expect to have a relatively small section of the population subsidizing everything and everyone and getting nothing in return.

I think they should start charging for missed appointments, both hospital and GP rather than charge for seeing someone.

Before the NHS people didn’t rush to see a doctor at the first sign of a cough, cold, splinter in their finger etc! The current system is unsustainable partly because lots of people do t want to take any responsibility for their own health. Something has to change

Not only that but private dental charges in this country have become so extorsionate that even if you earn fairly well you cannot get treatment especially in an emergency. It is horrific. Our dental practice only does the counting of teeth to charge for a check up every 6 months - money for nothing. If you need any treatement they can only do it privately.

But you don’t get a GP appointment for a cough, cold or splinter.

That is very accurate. My specialist abroad who I had to travel to see because I wasn't getting the care I needed here told me also that they were seeing patients who vame too late as their conditions were missed or not taken seriously leading to serious illness. Numerous other drs abroad some of whom worked in the Uk for a while were talking about how bad care has become in the NHs. This idolisation of the NHS is delusional. For every person qho had a great experience there are many others who had their lives ruined.
Not to be forgotten that our taxes also pay for the eye watering compensations NhS pays out for malpractice.

I don't agree with charging. Not everyone has the money. The NHS was set up because people couldn't afford to pay for the doctor and very often people died from complications arising from infection etc.
By all means if you are affluent enough to pay that's your choice, but I for one cannot afford it and I wouldn't be able to get health insurance for my pre existing illnesses. It isn't as straightforward as some politicians would have you believe.

GP surgerys have cut back on a lot of services where they payment did not justify the work, or to refit personnel and resources to more demanding work and firefighting.
It may be that services are no.longer offered, or with limitations such as bariatric surgery requiring a BMI of xx or stop smoking and we will see you.

Some non essential medication could be no longer available on the NHS. You would have to buy it from the pharmacy.

I unfortunately have been taken to A&E twice a few weeks ago staying in for a week. Both times there were no beds available in a&e nor beds for admittance. I was on a recliner chair with 10 other patients, I was being constantly (every 10 minutes) violently sick and the other end at same time in front of all these other patients then put in a bed in the corridor until next morning when I finally got a room under infection control in emergency ward. I was in there for the week with everyone having to gown and mask up.
the first night I was in A&E I was in resus but the second night while they were trying to find a bed I saw several people that just should not have been there and could of easily been seen to by their GP or just rested and stayed at home. There was even an older couple having a day/ evening out whilst I was sitting in the chair next to them, the lady had backache (I’ve had 2 major back surgeries myself) and she was walking moving around etc also her husband had brought a picnic they were both eating next to me as I was puking up!!
another bloke had had a bad finger since the previous Monday and was finally told to go home. There are far too many people on social media going to A&E for attention that have no business being there and are not seriously ill or could see a GP or pharmacy A&E IS FOR accidents and emergencies ONLY! Not to put rubbish on these platforms for people that really shouldn’t be there. Yes I agree £10 for a GP visit would soon sort the time wasters out and x-rays £15, scans £30 etc same as inpatient should pay a tenner a day towards food etc, you would pay for food if you were at home and I’m saying this as a OAP just living on state pension! Our NHS wasn’t created for the amount of patients there are in this country these days, and it would definitely make some people think twice about abusing the system. I would happily pay for a better service as long as it was kept reasonable and went straight back into the NHS services and NOT into some fat cat managers pockets.

I don't necessarily think we shouldn't reform the NHS but I think we need to be very careful about how we do so. I still think a majority state system would be much better - 95% of France are covered by the public scheme and refunds for payment is not a completely bad idea as long as its administred well - I'd have a minimum income to enact it. I wouldn't have it linked to employment. Instead I'd have a' dedicated contribution' not from employers and employees but from progressive tax. Germany still heavily regulates insurance companies because they have to accept people and caps the amount of procedures which I'd think we must also do. Also Germany and France spend more per capita on healthcare infrastructure, staffing (doctors are paid more), and beds. And for all the talk on admin fees in the NHS we spend less on admin/managers than Germany. The NHS spends around 2-3% of its budget while Germant spend 5-6% because it has to regulate competition between insurance. However I don't think the idea of just a basic £15 would like the OP suggested would be enough anyways (considering GP's get £110 per appointment) so the state would still pay around £95 and then have to administer the £15 charge and would make that much of a difference to the wait lists etc. I also wouldn't charge for emergency care and hospital fees would be majority the dedicated state fund (you could incentive companies to add to it, conditions of infrastructure and energy building in the UK). Also both France and Germany have more state protection for other things which reduced deprivation and thus preventable deaths:
France: 1. Universal payments for all families with at least two children under 20. Higher rates for larger families and low‑income household - OECD estimates show child poverty rates would be around 25% without transfers, but fall to about 13% after them. Housing Support Means‑tested support with rent or mortgage costs for over 6 million households receive this. It covers students, low‑income workers + the unemployed. Roughly 17–18% of housing stock is social housing, and 20-25% of towns have to have social housing. A guaranteed minimum income for adults with low or no income, including a top‑up for single parents which reduces extreme deprivation.

Germany: Child Benefit - paid to all parents regardless of income (€250 per child per month - so around €6000 per year for 2 kids). Reformed welfare system guaranteeing a basic income for unemployed or very low‑income households. It now includes housing allowances, integration support). A means‑tested housing allowance subsidy for low income tenants which around 1.5 million - 2 million get. Rent caps in some cities. France’s child poverty rate after transfers is 13-14%. Germany’s is 11-12%. The UK’s is around 18-20% (post‑benefits)

We could change our healthcare system to France and Germany but we cannot do that in isolation. If we want to model France and Germany's healthcare system let's also implement the reforms they have in housing and child benefit, and minimum income.

Yanbu. It should be privatised, income tax reduced and we buy insurance instead. It would result in much better health care.

So every other country in the world is wrong? We are the only country with this model - no one has copied us - because it doesn’t work.

This is already the case, GPs are now under strict conditions to not prescibe something which is affordable over the counter, unless they are prescribing an advanced version. So you can get Co-codamol over the counter however the dose is capped at 8/500mg whereas I get 30/500mg and more tablets in one go. So for that if they want a stronger dose not available over the counter then they can prescibe otherwise tell them what specially to buy which is my experience for the last few years has always happened.

It's not free though is it? We pay for in via our wage packets.

Id rather a healthier society than people who cannot afford medical care of any kind.

Jeez how do you get so harsh? Are you so comfortable that you would deny others health care? Are you so insulated that you only care about yourself? How does being cushioned make people so hard?

They can’t be that strict. I know someone who’s prescribed aspirin.

Not saying your wrong about the couple having a picnic but as someone who lives in chronic pain, I can look surprisingly fine whilst I'm having extreme pain as I know many with chronic illness etc could attest to. Plus charging for scans is a slippery slope because scans cost a ton so £30 is nothing. Plus if people don't get scans it often delays diagnosis. That finger could have been badly infected and going through many layers of skin, broken etc so it's not necessarily something that can be dealt with in primary care. Also the couple rightly had to wait a while if they didn't have a good enough reason to be there, because triage works, so they would have waited a while (not a bad thing if they genuinely had a bad reason to be there).

If they qualify for free prescriptions then yes, they can prescribe over the counter for them, but encouraged not to. I also know that some aspirin doses that doctors would want to prescribe would be higher than allowed over the counter. Ibuprofen for example over the counter you can only get 2 packs at a time or the one behind the pharmacy with the amount of 3 packs (again pharmacist needs to verify you have a good reason) so if the GP needed to do more tablets or a higher dose, then they'll do that.

Yeah, my dad is prescribed Sanatogen.

I agree. If someone had a condition that might be cancerous, and if they were short of money, they wouldn't bother going to see their GP until it was too late. In the long term, that could work out costing the NHS far more.