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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

#421
post #244

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…

No, that’s called state-controlled capitalism. Change board of directors to senators and you have all the same problems of free market capitalism.

Industrial democracy, where workers own and control the company, backed by a robust welfare state, is socialism.

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

#422

Quoted post unavailable.

What exactly is the point you are trying to make? Yes, under a pro-spending, forward-looking government (such as the one we had from roughly 1997 to 2010), staffed public services improved and a trajectory was laid down for future improvements. Under pro-austerity, myopic governments (such as the one we had from 2010 until now), public services have been rotting from the inside. It's not difficult to draw a straight…

> pro-spending / pro-austerity

NHS spending 2009/2010: £124.1 billion

NHS spending 2019/2020: £148.9 billion

> What exactly is the point you are trying to make?

You don't have a clue about what's actually going on in reality. That was the point. Thanks for proving it.

> Pouring money into "diversity" is certainly nothing to do with it

It must be nice to be able to spend the same money twice. Please let us know how exactly to accomplish this feat.

> Overall resilience of the NHS

People dying right now waiting for ambulances. People dying in spates of cancer and heart disease due to delayed screening or missed treatments[1]. "the NHS is so resilient".

> It's not difficult to draw a straight line from one to the other.

So your plan is to put all your eggs into one basket (i.e. state-run health care) and then cross your fingers that no bad politicians (ehm conservatives) ever get into power. That sounds like a very well thought out and forward looking plan.

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-re-at-pandemic-levels...

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McDonalds is able to sell garbage food because most Americans are addicted to sugar. Your free-market evangelism is the economic equivalent of their junk food.

I enjoy a meal at McD's regularly. I just have a QP, I never buy shakes or soft drinks. The QP is healthy food. Besides, the US under free market agriculture produced the tallest people in the world up until WW2. It's kinda hard to believe that Americans grew that tall from eating garbage.

So Americans were the tallest until McDonalds arrived? (est. 1940)

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like this kind of knee-jerk "privatisation bad, fatcat CEOs bad" reaction sadly prevalent in the UK. Let's talk about the underlying argument, shall we? Firstly, you're talking about a failure of a regulator to regulate an industry and prosecute alleged perpetrators, and the implied solution is to… nationalise the industry, somehow assuming the nationalised entity will be managed better by the very sam…

You are assuming they are competing. They are not, you get one choice for water company in the UK. Therefore, by your own argument, they have no incentive to provide a good service.

I mean, in theory there's the backstop of getting water delivered by truck and everyone having a septic tank. Service would have to be extremely bad for that to be the better option, though. Just like how trains compete with buses, cars and planes.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Are you really going to pretend -- to this audience -- you haven't enjoyed the (yes) magical benefits of profit-seeking innovation? Progressivism conquered America a century ago. Antitrust law. Central bank. Income tax. Universal suffrage. Old age pensions. Public education, research grants. National parks. Interstate highways. Welfare, public housing. Equal opportunity employment. Disaster relief. Socialized medicin…

People are (hopefully) concerned with growing inequality, wealth centralising into small pockets of society, the lawlessness in which multinational corporate entities operate, the damage being caused to the environment by heavily promoted consumerism..

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that we know about I.e. there's no evidence.

> I.e. there's no evidence. It's not like the CIA likes to document its dark-ops in Latin Am. on wikipedia as proof for you.

> It's not like the CIA likes to document its dark-ops in Latin Am. on wikipedia as proof for you.

This is still not proof of anything happening, just because someone wants something to be true doesn't make it so.

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the right obtains power, they incrementally and consistently put the pieces in place to ensure that the quality of gov-provided services decreases over time. My favourite was when one promised 'fiscal restraint' and no deficits, so they sold off a 99y lease on a tolled highway to plug their deficit. They promised prices wouldn't go up more than 30% in 15 years, but they went up 200%. https://www.thespec.com/ne…

While your point about aircraft landings is funny, I'm guessing general aviation in Canada is similar to that of the US. It's not really uncommon for planes to land on highways in the US. Even busy ones. It just isn't very interesting to be honest, so no one makes much point about it. I think the FAA publishes numbers on that sort of thing.

You're missing the point. The 40x series highways around Toronto are some of the most gridlocked transportation networks in North America. I believe often ranking worse than LA or Atlanta etc etc. The 401 is pretty much bumper to bumper every single day all day except maybe at like 3am.

The 407 toll route the author is describing takes basically the same route as the gridlocked 401. The toll on the highway is insanely high, probably 10 x higher than anything you'll see in the US on any of the EZpass etc type routes. If you were to take it end to end (100ish km or 60 miles, maybe a 45 minute or 1 hour drive tops) you'd probably be paying at least $60 CAD or so.

Because it's so high, it's essentially vacant large parts of the day.

Yes planes can land on highways and do so all the time. The point is that the only highway they could do that on in the GTA is the 407. Because it's priced so insanely high.

And that money is going straight into private sector bank accounts, not into public coffers.

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

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discharge the less ill people, free up a bed for the more ill ones. It's all about throughput. You're only looking at the front while the problem is in the back.

I think perhaps their point is that, if some of the patients not discharged are consuming a nurse budget that isn’t required (because they are healthy and can be discharged), then this nurse budget could be redeployed to those waiting in admissions. Not sure how reasonable this is, I’m sure the hospitals will have thought of it themselves. But it does seem particularly silly to have the paramedics stuck in place and…

Hmm, this seems to have been attached to the wrong parent comment, and I am now unable to delete it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense) Maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but it makes their buddies in the private sector a lot of money. And that's the game in capitalism, making a lot of money. The government competing with affordable options for everyone against the private sector is "bad for business".

Let’s not pretend corruption is unique to capitalism.

Corruption is a human ingrained need for trickery to gain advantage of potential gene competition. It is ubiquitous for humans and increases with perceived genetic difference, up to a maximum.

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How can you look at horrible evil companies literally destroying the environment around us just because it makes them more money and say there's no alternative?" I guess for me I just don't understand how nationalising a given company makes it stop emitting carbon.

Nobody's talking about carbon here mate

Insert your pollutant of choice
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