311–320 of 429 posts
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Waiting lists are going down. They just cleared the backlog of people waiting 3 years for treatment
Sure, and the excess deaths above help a lot in doing that. Still, while waiting for patients to die is an cheap way to shorten backlogs, it does leave not instill confidence…
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Oddly, things kind of flipped around (in very broad terms). The left is where some of the well-off urban middle classes are, along with the far-left socialists. The right is where the less well off but working are, along with some non-urban upper- and middle-class voters. Because for a lot of working class people (primarily those who work, and aren't living off state support), they have been entirely abandoned by Lab…
Agree. As I once had it explained to me, "I don't choose parties any more, I just use my best guess as to which one will mean I take home more of my salary". There's also the European angle. Those who want to work likely faced competition from EU workers and generally feel hard done by when it comes to globalisation. After all, if you worked in coal, steel, car manufacturing or your family did, quite likely you, or a…
The typical profile of a brexiteer is somebody retired, not somebody in employment, and I think the reasons are largely ideological, rather than practical; polling showed people who supported brexit would still do so if the hypothetical included economic pain.
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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.
> Medicare is 13% of the US government budget. More federal money goes to Medicare than to the Department of Defense. 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 coh…
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> 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…
Right, I’ll quote it here for you:
“The contribution which an organized and living Europe can bring to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations. In taking upon herself for more than 20 years the role of champion of a united Europe, France has always had as her essential aim the service of peace. A united Europe was not achieved and we had war.
Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries.
With this aim in view, the French Government proposes that action be taken immediately on one limited but decisive point.”
The CECA was from the begining the first step towards “a United Europe”, however close that unification might be. They just realised that they needed gradual steps. You can disagree with the steps, their size, and their frequency, but the end goal was explicit from the beginning.
> The red line for the UK government is freedom of movement.
And the common agriculture policy. And the fisheries policy. And the customs union. And the human rights. And Ireland. The British government had a lot of incompatible red lines from the beginning. This was obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.
> 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.
That was a position (participation in the EEA but not the EU) the UK did not want to take. Besides, it was not even realistic in the first time. We are not in the 1980s anymore and Europe has changed quite a bit since then.
> 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
That is not going to happen, at least in the foreseeable future, for several reasons. The first one being that the member states consider that their national sovereignty and they are the one pulling strings in the council. The Parliament cannot do that on its own, it’s just a convenient straw man.
> 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.
More undemocratic than the Parliament in Westminster? You must be joking. And how accountable is the Bank of England? But yeah, rule Britannia.
Also, you forget that the British government pushed all the way along this drift towards a more neo-liberal, insulated from the whims of its populations, Europe.
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"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…
> It how do we share out increasingly scarce resources in a country that is getting poorer 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.
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.
> Unless a politician actually makes the unpopular move to... massively increase fertility There is no magic political move to increase fertility. If there was Japan would have done it decades ago.
Hint: LVT
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…
I'll just say that it's still better than the German system. Same ridiculous waiting times for a 50/50 chance to just get a paracetamol prescription. Private is expensive as hell, nonexistent or not usable. Mental healthcare? Pay us, fuck you. Medication newer than 30 years? Stop huffing that ibuprofen, Bruder. But it's defended to death by the German Internet Chairforce, so it's got that going for it.
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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 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).
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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.
> Medicare is 13% of the US government budget. More federal money goes to Medicare than to the Department of Defense. 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 coh…
Retirees on the private market get completely shafted, though: almost everybody in their age group uses medicare, so the insurance will need very high premiums to cover their risks. From what I have heard, people who are on employer plans at that age have better health outcomes than retirees, regardless of where the retiree gets their healthcare.
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Why do you think they haven't considered the possibility?
Because if the possibility turned out to be true, it would be extremely damaging at a social and political level. Not just on institutions, but on the psyche of people in general. I think everyone understands this at least on a subconscious level. There must not be any truth to it, because if there was, it would do too much damage. So why would I want people to discuss something that could potentially have that kind…