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

uk.news.yahoo.com

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

#231

Post by ricardobayes »

tehbeard wrote: post #202
rleigh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’ve also misrepresented the nature of private healthcare in the UK I mentioned that we don't have the right to opt out of paying for the NHS. It's not possible go entirely private. If you could opt out, you could pay that money to a private provider instead and entirely forego the use of the NHS. That isn't an option today. But it should be.

And when you have a heart attack in the street, who's responding? In this scenario, why should an NHS ambulance pick you up when you don't contribute? Surely it should prioritize those on public healthcare? Some poor lad whose leg is broken from a fall?

Your insurance would pick up the tab in this scenario.

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

#233

Post by phtrivier »

origin_path wrote: post #143
solar-ice wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; the reason people exonerate it is that the Tories have been threatening the population with a dismantling and privatisation of the NHS for over a decade now, and that's not what anyone wants. People want the NHS to work, to be funded and managed appropriately. A primary reason it doesn't is the Tories crippling it.

That's what lots of people want - I can assure you, I know quite a few - but the British left attacks anyone so viciously and nastily that they aren't ever going to admit it to anyone seen in the vicinity of a Guardian. The NHS has collapsed since COVID. No, it isn't due to lack of funding, that's a lie. NHS funding has increased massively under the Conservatives who haven't talked about even limited privatisation fo…

I'm genuinely interested in the link to the data about the vaxx / unvaxxed split.

I know the most ardent antivaxxers are going to explain every death in the next 30 years by the vaxx ; but the numbers would be so staggering that I suspect plain old counting would help.

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

#234

Post by ricardobayes »

rleigh wrote: post #221
Teever wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this should be an option?

Why should it be an option? Because we live in a free country, and should be free to spend our money as we see fit. Even if others don't agree with it. Why should we all be compelled by the force of law to divert a huge fraction of our income to an organisation which is so ineffective and inaccessible? We are forced to spend a significant fraction of our salaries on the NHS whether or not we want to. If we feel that…

Even though I agree with your comment, I don't know of any European countries where you could opt-out from paying social security. Even if some small eastern european country has this option, it is probably unsustainable for a larger country (or one with more healthcare spending).

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

#235

Post by simonh »

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.

The pressure on NHS budgets is largely due to economic conditions. Looking at funding compared to GDP rather than nominal terms shows this. NHS funding peaked at 7.5% of GDP in 2010, but that peak was mainly due to a drop in GDP, not an increase in funding. With tax revenue declining due to recession and an extended period of low growth those funding levels were unsustainable. We're still actually spending about the same percentage of GDP on health care now as we were in 2009.

The blue bars in the chart are recessions, when funding relative to GDP jumped mainly due to a drop in GDP, not an increase in funding.

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/70-years-of-nhs-s...

The historical lesson is yes, if you want big increases in NHS funding elect a Labour government (although by 1997 the Conservatives were already ramping up health care spending), but I'm not convinced the UK economy has much leeway to support spending a lot more than the current 7% of GDP on health care.

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

#236

Post by ogogmad »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #224
odiroot wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventive care is absolutely the most important to keep the society healthy and moving forward. Currently people just give up on contacting their surgeries, letting their symptoms develop into something potentially more dangerous. Then they end up at A&E, overloading the hospitals. Maybe it's not so bad in the 3 biggest cities (possibly due competing private services), but at smaller cities and towns, it's impossibl…

The NHS spends a lot of money trying to get people to use the right level of care, like pharmacists, info on the web https://111.nhs.uk/ and by phone. I don't particularly see a face-to-face visit to a GP when you think you have an issue as preventitive, but if it was, I still don't see how telemedecine wouldn't be a partial solution to that problem, not make it worse.

My mother only found out she had cancer when she saw a GP for an unrelated condition.

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

#237

Post by gautamcgoel »

rleigh wrote: post #221
Teever wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this should be an option?

Why should it be an option? Because we live in a free country, and should be free to spend our money as we see fit. Even if others don't agree with it. Why should we all be compelled by the force of law to divert a huge fraction of our income to an organisation which is so ineffective and inaccessible? We are forced to spend a significant fraction of our salaries on the NHS whether or not we want to. If we feel that…

Isn't your argument really an argument against paying taxes in general?

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

#238

Post by jl6 »

tremon wrote: post #193
chiefalchemist wrote: post #136

> 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. Any…

What unintended consequences are we talking about here? The problems in the article don't stem from lockdowns, they stem from delays caused by capacity problems in the healthcare system. So, if anything, the article describes the unintended consequences of those who deliberately kept fighting all measures to curb the spread of COVID.

It seems pretty obvious that there are multiple contributing factors, including both long-standing capacity issues, the long-standing obesity issue, and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.

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

#239

Post by harvey9 »

Aerroon wrote: post #212
Folcon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't wish to be snarky, but you are aware that the NHS as an institution has existed since the late 1940's and has been working reasonably well for a long time? An institution does not become beloved by the public for failing to provide a good standard of care for a long enough time that people become used to it doing so. So when you say: > It never had a great track record to begin with. Are you talking about gov…

> An institution does not become beloved by the public for failing to provide a good standard of care for a long enough time that people become used to it doing so. Here's how you do it: you pump unsustainable amounts of money into the service over time. This allows you to offer a great service until in the future you can't pump enough money into it anymore. But that's a problem for the future generations. Those futu…

the uk spends far less per capita than the usa. can you explain what you mean by unsustainable?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h...

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

#240

Post by DanBC »

rleigh wrote: post #221
Teever wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this should be an option?

Why should it be an option? Because we live in a free country, and should be free to spend our money as we see fit. Even if others don't agree with it. Why should we all be compelled by the force of law to divert a huge fraction of our income to an organisation which is so ineffective and inaccessible? We are forced to spend a significant fraction of our salaries on the NHS whether or not we want to. If we feel that…

We've had privatisation experiments in English healthcare for years.

Dentistry is a fucking mess. Eye care is a fucking mess. Care and Nursing homes are a fucking mess. Large private provision of GP care? They can't do it and they hand the contracts back. Specialist commissioning in mental health? It's a fucking mess.

> It's run by Whitehall and politicians, with little input from those actually doing the real work.

If you say things like this it makes me think that you don't know that NHSEngland/Improvement is an arms-length-body, nor what that means in terms of command and control of the English NHS. It makes me think that you didn't know what CCGs were nor how they worked, and that you don't know what an ICS/ICB is nor how they work.

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