301–310 of 429 posts
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I'll bite. What is the mechanism by which the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine could harm peoples health months or years down the line?
https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73/htm is a in vitro (but not in vivo) demonstration of one element of this theory.
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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.…
A mess in what way? Do you have to wait 2 years for a private dentistry appointment? Because that's the current wait time for an NHS psychiatrist.
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The UK media is an example of an oligarchy successfully controlling the entire information landscape and consistently pushing for manufactured “problems of the week” while ignoring real disturbing trends in home ownership, poverty, health and inequality between London and the abandoned “regions”. The book “Fake law” was terrifying to me - it talks about a whole number of high profile judicial cases that were pretty m…
BBC? The Guardian? The Independent? I think you're picking and choosing narratives here, not accurately representing reality.
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> 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 find this is a common and totally unjustified take. The NHS is fairly frequently subject to alteration and reform in various ways, and there is no real truth to the “piles of bureaucracy and waste” stories - it remains broadly pretty efficient as a healthcare system when compared with other developed countries. You’ve also misrepresented the nature of private healthcare in the UK - this is almost universally not a…
edit: and of course you'll rely on NHS for any emergency.
[1] at least not without paying out of pocket for the significantly more expensive premium coverage. Some now offer phone consultations but you still need to go to the GP for referrals and prescriptions.
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Why do you think they haven't considered the possibility?
So why would I want people to discuss something that could potentially have that kind of impact? Because I want people to face all of the possible consequences for their choices, not just pick and choose which ones they will consider and acknowledge.
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…
They are not responsible for the lack of funding but my experience with NHS's admin has been pretty bad and they can't blame "government's cuts" for everything.
I know people who work in consulting in the Big Four and everyone wants to avoid NHS projects because of their internal organisation and waybof working.
The NHS has a big organisation and quality of people problem as well.
It is a sacred cow, as you mention, and in general people are reluctant to say anything bad about it.
We have the same issues in Canada with our public health system. No one wants to talk about this, but my unpopular opinion is the real problem is our retirement program and lack of fertility - we're way too generous, and without a tax base there's only so much we can do. Unless a politician actually makes the unpopular move to cut retirement benefits or massively increase fertility this is only going to get worse.
There is no magic political move to increase fertility. If there was Japan would have done it decades ago.
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NHS and Medicare have historically had both very efficient allocation of resources and excellent health outcomes. This NHS argument is about new data that to me seems impossible to deconflate with a global pandemic. Basically, libertarians are just wrong on this. Government-run health care works great and we have many decades of evidence showing that.
This is the first time I have ever heard of Medicare being held up as efficient. Medicare is 13% of the US government budget. More federal money goes to Medicare than to the Department of Defense. In contrast, the care that people get from Medicare is substantially worse than what you get from private insurance in the US.
These are not measures of efficiency. Medicare outlays are about 30-40% of private insurance for the same demographics.
> the care that people get from Medicare is substantially worse than what you get from private insurance
And this is, in fact, not true at all. US citizens on medicare beat their cohorts not only vs. other nations but vs. private insurance in the US too. Don't make the mistake of comparing your corporate insurance for a workforce with a median age of 30 with what retirees in the private market have available.
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> 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 pay privately through my employer's plan, and then again for the NHS." And yet it is the private system in the UK that is taking away scarce supply from the NHS making it more vulnerable. There is a supply side limit on doctors and nurses, which means private healthcare works like the Fast Track queue at Alton Towers. All it does is allow people with money to jump the queue at the expense of everybody else. And re…
In this instance, the resources are humans, and it seems you want to force humans to do something they don't want to do. If you want slave-doctors just say so. It worked for the Romans I guess.
The government has been siphoning money from the UK population at an ever greater rate while redistributing it to very large private organisations. It won't change by voting in some other bunch of cronies, they're all in the pockets of a great unelected one way or another.
We need to wake up to the fact we all live in a facist oligarchy which is impossible to avoid when we let governments get this large.