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Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

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Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#251

Post by pharmakom »

mattlondon wrote: post #234

As a UK tax payer, and as a UK tax payer that winces every time they see how much they lose to taxation in their P60 each year (six figures in tax), what are people's solutions to this? It seems like the NHS budget keeps on going up and up and up [1], as does the number of doctors and nurses (while "managers" has either declined or stayed relatively static) [2]. So NHS is getting more funding, and there are more doct…

Funding may go up but demand increases more because UK population is old and overweight… and getting more so. This is the reality of an aging population plus socialised health care.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#252

Post by roywiggins »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #236
dia80 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, The ambulances are waiting outside the hospitals with the last patient so they can't go to get the next one. Source: Family members have recently waited some hours outside A&E in an ambulance.

This is hard to believe. Just wheel the patient through the front door and let the hospital do the babysitting. There is no sense in using an ambulance as a waiting room.

The emergency department fills up because they can't find beds to admit people to. When the emergency department is full, there's nowhere for the ambulance patients to be put.

Just one of many, many stories on this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-61395685

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#253

Post by kingkawn »

WalterBright wrote: post #225
asdff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand how people can simultaneously believe that governments are corrupt and the private sector would support the public's interests. Guess who is corrupting government: the private sector who only support their own interests.

I know this is difficult to understand how it works, but the beauty of the free market is everyone benefits while selfishly working for their own self-interest. Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.

Too much koolaid

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#254

Post by WalterBright »

asdff wrote: post #244
WalterBright wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the seller, in a free market, has to please is customer. The way to please the customer is to have the customer benefit from the transaction. For example, how long do you think McDonald's would last if its McBurgers tasted bad? McDonald's success is extremely tied to customer satisfaction. Tossing the ball back to you, under socialism, why would the socialist service care if you're pleased with the service or…

Because a socialist system is ran by the public. It is beholden to the public as its shareholders. Mcdonalds needs to taste tasty, but only to get you hooked enough to choose mcdonalds over other foods. You think the shareholders would rather their customers actually eat healthy which means limiting consumption of Mcdonalds? No, they are practically in the business of selling cigarettes but in the form of fats and su…

> It is beholden to the public as its shareholders.

Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation.

Every one.

> The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible.

True, but the way to get that money is to please the customer, because the company cannot force them to buy.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#255

Post by iam-TJ »

badcppdev wrote: post #92
iam-TJ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increase in demand - much of which is attributed (by the NHS itself) for people having poor life-styles (meaning tending to obesity [0] and not maintaining physical and mental fitness), and the tendency for people to be kept alive longer existing with chronic conditions that a few decades ago would have naturally expired (dead!). There's been an endemic problem for the last 30+ years where-by a large proportion of th…

The UK has an ageing population. A higher percentage of older people and fewer younger people. Saying that those old people should have died earlier would be disgusting so I'm sure that's not what you meant. So to be clear there's an increase in demand because British people are living longer. That's a good thing and should result in increased funding.

It's exactly what I mean. There is absolutely no value in hanging on to the last possible moment due to ever increasing levels of interventions.

Living longer is not "a good thing" if that life is costing (not just in financial terms) society and the country so much more and the person can not sustain an independent quality of life.

In 1946-47, when the NHS, National Insurance (state pensions), and related programmes were created the average survival after retirement (60 for women, 65 for men) was 10 years or so (average mortality was 75 for men and little later for women).

So pension funding only needed to last on average 10 years and there was no comprehensive costly life-sustaining interventions to keep people alive that would otherwise have popped their clogs.

Now the average age of mortality in men is 85 and 89 for women, and these are rising. And as these are averages there are a lot of people lasting a lot longer - many spend years sitting in a chair effectively waiting for Death to show up.

So now the same pension funding has to provide for 20 or more years AND there are many costly and life-sustaining health interventions and "social care" that add cost and load on a dwindling number of tax payers.

I'm a farm-boy born n bred, as is my father, who is now 86. He's been amazingly fit his entire life but the last two years he's going rapidly downhill due to onset of mild dementia, but also due to not accepting doctors advice on treatments and medicines (this he's been doing for 40 years!) and subsequently hitting crisis where there have to be expensive emergency interventions.

As far as I am concerned he is abusing the NHS - like those who are obese or mistreating themselves in other ways - and if it were up to me I'd refuse to treat his emergencies if he is not prepared to look after himself by simply taking medicines that would prevent the emergencies.

Personally, I'll kill myself when I can no longer be useful.

Humans need to learn from how the rest of the planet's breathing life-forms treat life... and death, and lose the sentimentality. The planet already has twice as many humans on it as it can naturally sustain.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#256

Post by pessimizer »

WalterBright wrote: post #225
asdff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand how people can simultaneously believe that governments are corrupt and the private sector would support the public's interests. Guess who is corrupting government: the private sector who only support their own interests.

I know this is difficult to understand how it works, but the beauty of the free market is everyone benefits while selfishly working for their own self-interest. Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.

> I know this is difficult to understand how it works

Are we going to pretend that free market capitalism and its magical benefits haven't been pounded into all of our heads from every angle from the moment we were being taught anything about how the world works? It's not difficult to understand, it's difficult to see in a world where companies commit crimes and collapse in mountains of debt, but no one goes to jail. Not a situation that Adam Smith would approve of.

The reason the benefits capitalism are spread out to any degree is because there are riots when they aren't, so you need to at least reward the people responsible for putting those riots down through violence, technology, and bureaucracy. Hence, the middle class.

> Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.

"Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine. Even capitalists are socialist amongst themselves when it comes to keeping out competition.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#257

Post by Mechanical9 »

wincy wrote: post #28
Overtonwindow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the US healthcare system is already collapsing" What do you mean by this, specifically? People not having insurance? Increasing deaths inside the hospital? Large numbers of people turned away from emergency rooms? I'm questioning this because with the exception of malpractice, the U.S. healthcare system seems to be working quite well, despite the large numbers of uninsured and those who cannot pay. I just don't buy…

People just love to talk about how horrible the US healthcare system is but my disabled daughter has never paid a dime for care in her life (in Kansas, of all places!) via Medicaid. Even her birth was free due to retroactive Medicaid. Her 9 months in the NICU was billed at over $2 million. Thanks taxpayers. I was having chest pains last week and got triaged within minutes at the ER. I’m pretty sure I “owe” them $500…

Man it just seems insane to me that you are acting like being billed $2 million, $200,000, and having unknown other bills, is somehow a good system.

Let's be honest, overbilling and non-accountability is a huge disaster here. While people like you slip through the cracks in terms of not needing to pay, others slip through the cracks in terms of not getting care at all.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#258

Post by lkramer »

dekhn wrote: post #188
adolph wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you can't wait 12 hours you become excess mortality. Sometime before the 12 hour period, one must make a choice whether to seek care or not.

the 12 hour wait is once the person enters the doors of the facility. In a hospital, if you walk into the ER, people are observing you closely and expediting people at immediate risk of death. A person who can sit in a chair for 12 hours waiting didn't have an emergency. Instead, they were using the ER for non-urgent care.

A few years ago I had an infected gallbladder. It was enormously painful, and I went to ER. It might not have been potentially fatal (I'm honestly not sure if you can die from it), but I didn't know that. I just knew I was in a ridiculously amount of pain.

Anyway, so I went to the ER and to begin I did sit in a chair like you said, however I don't think anyone was keeping an eye on the patients, since by the time someone came to look at me, I had been writhing in pain on the floor for an hour or so, and it had taken another patient to call a nurse over.

All and all it took 4 hours before I got to see a doctor, but this was pre-pandemic.

Still, I think you're probably right and people do show up to A and E for non-urgent issues, however it's probably also tied to how difficult it is to see a GP these days.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#259

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway049 wrote: post #241
xtracto wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is too bad that corrupt government officials keep systemically defunding Social Health programs with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense). Then they point to the deficient healthcare and blame the "socialized" aspect of it for the issues. Here in Mexico we've seen it all play out: We had an amazing social healthcare system (in the form of the IMSS) in the 70s and 8…

In 2004 when I worked in NHS emergency care we had such a problem with no space in ED to unload ambulances that the ambulance service threatened to put a mass casualty tent in the hospital car park.

[deleted]

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#260

Post by [deleted] »

oliwarner wrote: post #157
xtracto wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is too bad that corrupt government officials keep systemically defunding Social Health programs with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense). Then they point to the deficient healthcare and blame the "socialized" aspect of it for the issues. Here in Mexico we've seen it all play out: We had an amazing social healthcare system (in the form of the IMSS) in the 70s and 8…

2004 was the peak of Blair-Brown Labour party investment. They didn't get it all right. They used PFI and outsourcing to fudge the sums on major investments, and I dare say they didn't invest in mental and social health care in the amount required. But nobody ever has. The job of fixing this is so expensive and requires so much political force. We're still worried French immigrants are going to eat our dingos, or som…

[deleted]
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