Why would Reform voters accept that they will scrap the NHS?

[NEGUY82]

Even when you present them with pretty undeniable proof they wants to do it they just say "lefty propaganda, he said he won't" - well of course he says he won't it would cost him the election.

There is of course a push to privatise because it would make lots of money for a certain few. Lest we forget.

A bit like housing when council houses were sold off and now councils are paying more to rent from private landlords who bought their properties. Once privatisation takes hold, it’s very difficult to come back from it. These companies want interest too.

NHS pays almost 25% of funding to private companies who now charge large amount of interest on that.

This includes various MPs who receive donations from the private healthcare industry. This website aims to keep a record of such donations.

https://privatisation.everydoctor.org.uk/does-your-mp-receive-private-healthcare-related-donations/

I think that this is such a clear conflict of interest that those MPs should not be allowed to vote in Parliament on any bill regarding the NHS.

Spot on

But the NHS is under funded. You talk as if we are all paying thousands a year in tax for healthcare. The truth is we aren't.

We spend less per head than France or Germany, so regardless of how you fund it that has to be addressed.

I've already mentioned that in France most are paying 40% tax as well as 9% for healthcare. Your employer also pays an additional 13%. In addition you have to meet 30% of the costs of your healthcare. So your GP visit of 70 euro you will claim 70% back and find 30%.

This idea that you change the funding model and you some how sort out the healthcare system is not a very good argument. The problem of how you treat 70 million people remains....there is no cheap fix and our healthcare system has been under funded for 40 years. It was Blair years that saw the reversal of years of cuts and injected fresh money into new hospitals and much of its infrastructure was funded by private money funded by tax payers.

There is no private body that will fund healthcare without significant guarantee of income. To fund our healthcare system through insurance would cost significantly more than it does right now and to reduce premiums would involve a system that charges more for those with complex health care needs. So what you end up with is some people being significantly worse off because there premiums reflect the cost to the system.

That the key to it all. How much are people willing to pay and should it be a collective responsibility to find it.

We've seen the disaster of a non collective system in the states. I think what should happen is that we should have general taxation of 40% and on top we should pay a healthcare premium tax of 10% to cover purely healthcare.

Does anyone really trust a man who takes millions in payments and fails to declare them not to sell off our healthcare to whoever will make him personally the most money?

As the replies on here will reveal ‘Reform voters’ is not a single group of similar people. Some people (I am not one of them) are in favour of removing the broad premise of free healthcare as we have it now.

The question I think you’re actually asking is why people who probably aren’t in an especially good position to pay for health insurance are still keen to vote for a party who are likely to remove access to free health care as we know it now

Again the answer is nuanced but part of is that they place greater weight on what Reform say they will do on immigration. And there’s also a large element of Farage et al selling them a lie about what a Reform future holds for them. Some people would benefit from a Farage led government (I am probably one of them as someone who currently pays a lot of tax even though I wouldn’t vote Reform in a thousand lifetimes) but so many of those he whips up into a frenzy will not. But he needs them to believe him right now. After that they won’t matter.

I wish some people here could experience healthcare systems in other countries to see the difference. I lived in other countries as a resident, and all the systems I've experienced in Czech, Poland, Germany were like night and day to NHS. Yes, the citizens pay for them, mainly through wages, but what you get is simply incomparable to Britain. Modern facilities, equipment, reports from scans on the day, blood results next day max, easy to get a referral to a specilist, access to some specilist like gyno, dermatologist without referal. Instant prescriptions which are all online and any pharmacy in the country can access. NHS has 3 times as many staff members to do the same thing and is 3 times slower. It is like NHS got stuck at the time it was built. And no, there are no exclusions of pre-existing conditions.

The "certain few" are already making lots of money out of the NHS too! Huge amounts of it are already privatised or services provided by private firms, or built under PFI agreements.

The NHS is an anachronism. Medical science has changed incredibly since the model of the NHS was conceived and it’s unsustainable in this day and age unless it’s privatised in some way that would still make it free at the point of use. It’s unrealistic to expect it to be funded via our taxes.
And if people are right about AI “taking all the jobs” then income from tax will
drop, making the situation even worse.

But if you compare the cost of healthcare relative to life expectancy, then Cuba comes out on top and that's a nationalised system. It's an impoverished country with a crumbling infrastructure, but its healthcare model includes a lot of preventative care and it manages to do a lot with surprisingly little.

I'm not saying we should adopt their system wholesale, but I think our politicians should visit Cuba and see what they can learn.

NHS managers are not the problem. Every single government has blood on their hands in terms of health policy.

Not a Reform voter, but the NHS is a failing, over funded monolith. It needs reforming.

"GP Committee for England vote overwhelmingly to explore an alternative strategy for general practice - BMA media centre - BMA" https://www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/gp-committee-for-england-vote-overwhelmingly-to-explore-an-alternative-strategy-for-general-practice

I think GPs are keen to get moving to change things. I saw this mentioned on the news so looked it up.

“Free at the point of use” means nothing. It just means they will send you a bill later.

What a surprise, GPs wanting to charge for private services to NHS patients on their lists. More money grabbing by them. This is exactly how the demise of NHS dentistry started with NHS dentists being allowed to offer "extra" services to their NHS patients privately, and ended with lots of them leaving the NHS completely.

I think the government need to come up with their own "alternative" for GP practices! Personally, I'd scrap them and move over to a continental system of lots of small "private" clinics with doctors and nurses that actually "do" things like x-rays, potting minor breakages, scans, etc rather than having GPs just being "desk jockeys" and not actually "doing" anything practical. Some surgeries don't even do their own blood tests anymore. When I last went with an ear infection, the GP couldn't find an otoscope despite checking every single consulting room.

I suspect that if GPs were allowed to charge patients, they'd suddenly find ways to "do" things again but only for private patients, but continue to fob NHS patients off to the nearest hospital on waiting lists etc.

I saw the French healthcare system up close when DMIL was taken ill. We took her to an emergency walk in clinic, and twenty minutes later she was in an ambulance blue-lit to the nearest big hospital where her son understood that she was being kept overnight for observation. In fact, she was in theatre half an hour later having surgery for a heart condition. I phoned next morning to ask what was happening, as I speak French reasonably well, and was told the surgery had been successful and we could visit later that day. She was in a room with another elderly lady, with a large window and trees outside choosing from the lunch menu.

Europeans pay specifically for healthcare, from salary via taxation, but the care is leagues better than the NHS. There is a small charge for a GP appointment and you pay for insurance via your payroll, but nobody is bankrupted or denied care. I'd cheerfully sign up for it.

Sounds a much better system.

The thing is we can keep the NHS in its current form. But it means things will get worse. Demand will get bigger, that’s inevitable.
What’s the point in having a free heath service it’s it doesn’t work ? You can’t see a GP without jumping through hoops first where I am. If you’re an adult it’s blinking difficult to see a GP.

It doesn’t work and it wasn’t designed for the modern day medical.

Why can’t we adapt the France model?

This is the way!

I don’t know you, but I doubt you’re cool enough to be the Mandalorian.

It would be difficult, and fiendishly expensive, to unpick the NHS universe while simultaneously constructing the network that underpins most of the European systems, not least because there's no single employer of last resort like the NHS. Of course, lots of routine services are contracted out, but the NHS is one of the two or three largest employers in the world.

Most GPs are sole practitioners without nursing support (because there are community nursing hubs are private businesses/practices. You make an appointment separately for routine infant care, wound dressings or vaccinations and pay separately).

Labs are privately owned too, and the patient drops off the samples and receives the results personally rather than via the doctor.

Big city and teaching hospitals may be state operations, but many of the smaller ones are owned and run privately or by charities. And France is still short of GPs, especially in rural areas.

The cost of healthcare is an issue everywhere, because of demographics and also because of medical and pharmaceutical advances.

Although it would be lovely, the transition would be brutal.

When you recall that 17 million people voted for Brexit it becomes easier to put the destruction of the NHS into perspective. Patrick Minford is the ' go to ' economist for the Leave campaign. He predicted that all industry will cease in Britain and even farming. There's no point to it , apparently and finance will take up the slack.

Presumably this means selling things off. And the NHS is the biggest prize left over from the locust years of Thatcherism. For many people sovereignty trumps health , education, housing and welfare. That might be an enviable position, far removed from this gross material plane - if Trump himself didn't loom so large...

Sounds like the way a healthcare system in a developed nation should run.
My experiences with the NHS have been shocking. 😔