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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

#261

Post by regularfry »

Oh, for heaven's sake. It's not that patients delayed treatment. It's not the sodding vaccine. It's emergency medicine collapsing because A&E departments can't discharge. They can't discharge because there aren't enough social care workers. There aren't enough social care workers because a) Brexit, b) vaccine hesitancy, c) shit pay, and d) chronic underfunding of public services in general.

Given that this is an article from the Telegraph, exactly how honest do you think they're likely to be about any of those factors?

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

#262

Post by yetanotherloser »

ricardobayes wrote: post #229
rleigh wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's not what anyone wants The NHS has been turned into what is effectively a state religion in some quarters. It's untouchable. It can't be criticised. It's immune to meaningful improvement and reform at this point. Yet everyone I know who works for the NHS has a litany of stories about the inefficiency and waste. And it consumes an increasing proportion of the GDP. Eventually, something will have to give. Its b…

I just don't know why that is, every piece of that puzzle I have met, was really efficient and generally doing a good job. Spain is now trying to fix this and pensions by doubling self-employed tax. UK should probably follow suit, UK self-employed tax is ridiculously low. 20% on profits until 50k pounds won't cover a functioning healthcare system (or pensions for that matter).

What on earth? UK selfemployment tax is far more aggressive than this and the tax authorities have been on an aggressive campaign against selfemployed people for many years, leading loads of people - including me - to give up selfemployment and end up paying LESS tax as a result.I miss selfemployment! but it doesn't bring enough benefits to justify being reamed AND demonised.

And fuck the NHS. Smash the shit out of it. We'll all die exactly the same number of times without it, but be healthier and happier on the way.

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

#263

Post by yetanotherloser »

loriverkutya wrote: post #247
ricardobayes wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't know why that is, every piece of that puzzle I have met, was really efficient and generally doing a good job. Spain is now trying to fix this and pensions by doubling self-employed tax. UK should probably follow suit, UK self-employed tax is ridiculously low. 20% on profits until 50k pounds won't cover a functioning healthcare system (or pensions for that matter).

In the UK id you are self employed you still need to pay National Insurance which is as far as I know used for funding healthcare.

It's not reserved for anything and hasn't been for ages.

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

#264

Post by DawnQFunk2 »

simonh wrote: post #235
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…

No post body was provided.

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

#265

Post by ljf »

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…

Is £2,647 per adult per year an unsustainable amount? How much is is OK to spend on the military? On roads? On tax breaks for energy companies?

Don't forget healthcare isn't about you, it is about society and if you don't care about society just think of it instead as having healthy employees and customers, who aren't ruined if they fall ill, and therefore have cash to spend...

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

#266

Post by sdenton4 »

daenz wrote: post #259

Quoted post unavailable.

From the article:

'“We are beginning to see the deaths that result from delay and deferment of treatment for other conditions, like cancer and heart disease, and from those associated with poverty and deprivation.

'“These come through more slowly – if cancer is not treated promptly, patients don't die immediately but do die in greater numbers more quickly than would otherwise be the case.”

'The Government has admitted that the majority of the excess deaths appear to be from circulatory issues and diabetes – long-term, chronic conditions that can be fatal without adequate care.'

These deaths are attributable to specific causes - chronic conditions not receiving proper ongoing care - which have nothing to do with the vaccines. Hell, vaccines /should/ be increasing the amount of ongoing treatment for these conditions, and helping people get back to regular checkups and the associated preventative / early-stage treatment. (noting of course that the current excess deaths are an extremely laggy indicator. the 'vaccines help' hypothesis should then be apparent in a year or two as the excess deaths come back down.)

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

#267

Post by rleigh »

DanBC wrote: post #242
rleigh wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Dentistry is a mess because of the funding model. It doesn't pay to be an NHS dentist, so most practices ceased to take NHS patients. If they fixed the funding model, the problem would resolve itself. The problem here was entirely self-inflicted by the NHS in its fixed price lists, which weren't sufficient to run a viable business on. The very opposite of a proper free-market economy. Finding an NHS dentist in some areas is impossible, but finding a private dentist is not. I've used both, and both were absolutely fine. The private dentist was more expensive, but they were charging a reasonable amount to fully cover their salaries, facilities and consumables. As with everything, you get what you pay for.

Regarding competition, the NHS hasn't really tried competition seriously now, has it? Not really. Not actually doing a complete decoupling the insurance funding and the service provision. The "choose and book" isn't that, is it? It's a small attempt, which is better than nothing, but it's not really surprising that it didn't drive a huge amount of change, when it's not really going to have a big impact upon the bottom line.

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

#268

Post by okeuro49 »

kergonath wrote: post #209
heurisko wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This old chestnut. Go read the Rome treaty or the Schuman declaration. The “it’s only economic” is a lie you’ve been sold by your own governments. The aim has always been political Union, from the beginning. Besides, the EU being “a trading bloc” would not solve any of the issues fa…

> This old chestnut. Go read the Rome treaty or the Schuman declaration. The “it’s only economic” is a lie you’ve been sold by your own governments. The aim has always been political Union, from the beginning.

That's not true.

The Schuman declaration refers to the European Coal and Steel Community, which was about making war between countries materially impossible ie. through economic, not political, integration. It doesn't refer to stopping war by creating a common European Parliament with the idea that French and Germans should be subsumed into a European citzenry, with freedom of movement.

Similarly, the Rome treaty established the European Economic Community. The idea of European citzenship being only established with Maastricht as late as 1992.

The history of the European Union has been that of economic integration, with political union coming afterwards. There are many who would have preferred it not come afterwards. To characterise the project soley in terms of those who wanted a pan-European political project is misleading.

Political union has not really worked. The European Parliament is a weak institution, and the sovereign debt crisis showed how unpleasant the democratic deficit is, in this case for everyday Greek citizens, as the European Commission forced through austerity measures, triggering a humanitarian crisis.

> Including on imports and exports, which is the essence of a trading bloc and would not be improved one bit of the EU were only one of those.

The red line for the UK government is freedom of movement. If the EU remained someething akin to ASEAN, ie. prior to Maastricht, the UK would rejoin, and everyone would enjoy sensible trading amongst similarly economically developed countries again.

The EU's dream of German and Greek citizens voting together as "EU citizens" in powerful European Parliament on fiscal issues such as a shared pension age and sharing taxes, will never happen, so we have to wait until that folly is over and peoples using the Euro will continue to find out that they have ceded their democracies to undemocratic institutions.

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

#269

Post by _benedict »

rleigh wrote: post #165
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 not what anyone wants The NHS has been turned into what is effectively a state religion in some quarters. It's untouchable. It can't be criticised. It's immune to meaningful improvement and reform at this point. Yet everyone I know who works for the NHS has a litany of stories about the inefficiency and waste. And it consumes an increasing proportion of the GDP. Eventually, something will have to give. Its b…

You are not paying twice over. Your private insurance is dramatically cheaper than it would be if it covered everything covered by the NHS.

You do have overlapping cover, but the most expensive cover (GP, long term chronic conditions, emergency care) are provided by the NHS. It’s far from clear that you would pay less if you had to cover the whole through a private policy.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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