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Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

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Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#131

Post by Folcon »

jeromegv wrote: post #121
starkd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure government bureaucracy is even capable of doing this? It never had a great track record to begin with.

They have actively worked at crippling it. Now that it’s crippled they tell you.. oh but surely the government can’t fix it, we need private enterprises to fix it! You walked right into it. What makes you think private business are capable of delivering something cheaper than what the government can do? The most expensive health care in the world is private.

To be honest I'd be ok with private healthcare if they had to also obey the same constraints as public healthcare.

IE they had to provide care to everyone at a reasonable price.

I'm deeply suspicious of healthcare that gets to exclude people for cost reasons.

I too can provide great healthcare if everyone is mandated to pay me for my services and I get to exclude those I treat, that's a great business, the healthy pay and I exclude the sick, what wonderful pure profit business!

The insurance model bothers me for that reason, they really shouldn't be allowed to exclude anyone, if they're taking on the business of healthcare, then that's that, they are providing a utility service, which means they supply to everyone and they make money by spreading the cost between everyone.

There are nuances to that, but practically that's the goal they should aspire to, but unfortunately that model isn't the most profitable.

I mean take a look at the original US health insurance that existed:

> The first plan guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for $6 a year, and was later extended to other employee groups in Dallas, and then nationally [0]

That insurance model worked, it just happened to get outcompeted by entities who were willing to undercut them by aiming to capture only the most healthy people, which is in effect a tragedy of the commons.

Which is a real problem in my book, I'd be fascinated to see what innovations a private company could come up with under that model. We might have missed out on a whole slew of interesting ideas if we kept going down that route, which would still have been a pretty profitable business and would have been a great success for those who do believe that the private space can do healthcare better.

As it stands I don't believe the current private model meets that criteria as it fails at the first hurdle of being a health care service, it doesn't care about health.

So it seems like the choices are bad private care, good public care and bad public care. So yea, I'm leaning to the good public care.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Cross_Blue_Shield_Associa...

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#132

Post by lettergram »

kergonath wrote: post #78
lettergram wrote: post #59

[flagged]

This bullshit does not resist the most superficial analysis. There were million deaths before vaccines were rolled out and death rates haven’t stopped declining since then. Also, there are plenty of countries to compare to, with similar vaccination rates as the UK.

UK keeps one of the best public records of deaths. That said, I also provided a link to the US (has similar excess deaths to the UK).

Taiwan also keeps very good records in is seeing a spike in death rates (and dramatic drop in birth rates) - https://www.economy.com/taiwan-china/death-rate

Different vaccines / drugs / lockdowns / treatments rolled out in different regions. I’m not claiming they’re exactly causing anything, but there are / is a correlation; based on multiple public records

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#133

Post by bloqs »

thrown_22 wrote: post #50
verytrivial wrote: post #9

The word "funding" does not appear in this article. The NHS has been systematically underfunded since the Conservative entered power more than a decade ago. The crisis is real, but it is a political choice.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... In 1997 the NHS had 1/5th the budget it does today. Do we think that service has improved 5 times in the period? Like universities the NHS has been eaten from the inside by administrators whose sole purpose is to keep doctors from doing actual work. Talk to a nurse and 4/5th of the bullshit they have to deal with is pointless paper work.

This is misprescription - it's the LACK of administrative staff to do that specific paperwork that has caused this. Political microwaving of the whole system to "reduce costs" but keep "front line staff" has meant everyone is doing jobs they arent qualified to do and suck at.

The amount of people who think they understand the NHS is interesting, and clearly newspaper driven.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#134

Post by raffraffraff »

jeromegv wrote: post #121
starkd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure government bureaucracy is even capable of doing this? It never had a great track record to begin with.

They have actively worked at crippling it. Now that it’s crippled they tell you.. oh but surely the government can’t fix it, we need private enterprises to fix it! You walked right into it. What makes you think private business are capable of delivering something cheaper than what the government can do? The most expensive health care in the world is private.

Exactly. Why would it be cheaper or better to run healthcare as a for-profit business? If you have to take a profit, then by definition there's less funds available for the actual service.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#135

Post by heurisko »

kergonath wrote: post #58
scrlk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are never going to get a serious debate around reforming the NHS until people move on from only comparing the UK to the US. There are many other systems that work - people only need to look across to Europe.

> people only need to look across to Europe That would be politically risky these days… The UK needs to come back to Earth before this happens.

It's the EU that arguably needs to come back to earth, by returning to a trading bloc, rather than a halfway house pan-european state.

The shared monetary system with no shared fiscal policy will come apart one day, as it nearly did with the Greek sovereign debt crisis.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#136

Post by chiefalchemist »

> If the current trajectory continues, the number of non-Covid excess deaths will soon outstrip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more deadly than the omicron wave.

I have friends in the UK and the USA who all during the pandemic were asking, what about the unintended consequences? Where are the models for the impact of these decisions? What are the numbers of collateral damage?

There were no answers. Anywhere. That simply doesn't make rational sense.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#137

Post by ZeroGravitas »

bhk wrote: post #129
jajahusjsna wrote: post #8

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for t…

There has been no drop in funding that might account for the recent "soaring excess deaths". Quite the opposite. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-... You speak of massive underfunding, but NHS funding has increased in real terms almost every single year since the 1950s: https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ "At the moment, UK public health spending is the equivalent of about 7%…

So they spend slightly more than double what they did in 1955, when the cost of providing healthcare has gone up nearly 4x due to the Beaumol effect. That doesn't seem good? You'd expect the service to gradually get worse in that case, wouldn't you?

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/wh...

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#138

Post by pyrophane »

tremon wrote: post #99
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just a nerd, but this bit: > Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone) Doesn't really strike me as a bad thing in itself. Once you get past the front line, things get pretty specialist and a general move to Telemedicine is probably a good thing, and is presumably happening all around the world for all sorts of reasons. People even do telesurgery now. And…

Once you get past the front line, things get pretty specialist But isn't a GP (general practicioner) exactly the front line of which you speak?

Right. I think the argument being made here is that if the job of the GP is just to route you to the appropriate specialist, well, they can do that virtually.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#139

Post by okeuro49 »

solar-ice wrote: post #106
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> decimate the health system and waste money on sending Refugees to Rwanda. It’s idiotic to prioritise that over the NHS. It all depends how you view the world. For many people, preserving the historical character and demographic of their country is an important issue. It might not be to you, you might consider it stupid, but it is a concern many people have. So much so, they would see illegal arrivals of non histor…

Supporting the party which consistently underfunds a British institution, and sells off parts of it to their mates, in order to protect Britishness. Sums up Tory politics nicely, really.

During the Covid time, the Labour party handed the Conservatives a blank check to do whatever they wanted with.

Accordingly, the Conservatives gave lucrative contracts to all their friends.

The current Labour party are useless holding them to account.

Re: Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

#140

Post by klabb3 »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #37
verytrivial wrote: post #9

The word "funding" does not appear in this article. The NHS has been systematically underfunded since the Conservative entered power more than a decade ago. The crisis is real, but it is a political choice.

A systemic risk to national healthcare systems is that they can be underfunded (or overfunded) in a way that private healthcare can’t because individuals are more diverse and make decisions more attuned to their individual situation. People have different preferences for how and how much they would choose to invest own healthcare, and if everyone is forced to bear one another’s bills, there will inevitably be people…

Well yeah that's how every insurance works, including private ones. You are put in a pool together with others who may be more or less costly than you on average. Not just insurance either. If you're buying stuff at all you're paying a premium for stuff you're often not using, eg customer support, return policies, marketing etc.

One you accept that you never have identical cost/benefit with others, we're just talking what level is acceptable, and what services should be covered. People seem fine with paying for fire departments, even though some people live in wooden houses and have candles at night. Healthcare has a similarly low fraud incentive, and is generally not something we "invest" in. Most of the world has recognized that and arrange it through a publicly funded system.

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