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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

#371

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> Notice how on that list none of South America countries appear after 1990s? This is regime change /that we know about/. Intelligence agencies haven't made a huge habit of discussing their covert successes. > Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there. Yes, because the international response would be quite severe if the US decided to what - destroy Venezuela? Foreign occupations and coups decimat…

> 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.

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

#372

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Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation. Those goalposts were just fine where they were, put them back and address the actual argument. Nobody was advocating for 'government run food production'.

Nobody advocates for government run food production because it is impossible to convince people they aren't starving when they are. That's why it's the poster boy for socialism's failures.

Winning an argument nobody was attempting to make isn't any kind of achievement Walter.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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?

My dad was a professor of finance in a midwestern college. He'd have students coming up to him saying "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"

> "Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine.

Both socialism and free markets require cooperation. The difference is that socialism requires forcible cooperation, and in free markets the cooperation is voluntary.

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

#374

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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…

Well, socialism isn't communism, and money still exists under socialism, so if the service center isn't doing their job, then, as you capitalists like to say, money talks. Capitalism, like democracy, is the worst form of government, except for all the others. To believe that the US brand of capitalism can do no wrong is to be as deluded as the communists were. If the free market were perfectly efficient, there would…

Um, the free market requires a government to enforce peoples' rights and to enforce contracts.

> They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.

If you think they're a ripoff, don't patronize them. Nobody is making you.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody advocates for government run food production because it is impossible to convince people they aren't starving when they are. That's why it's the poster boy for socialism's failures.

Winning an argument nobody was attempting to make isn't any kind of achievement Walter.

If socialism is better, why doesn't it work for food production?

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

#376

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…

My family owns a bunch of McDonalds. Success is tied to location mostly. The product is pretty meh at best. The only products that have maintained quality are fries, coffee and coke. The rest are worse by any measure. There’s a reason why Five Guys, etc are everywhere. People who want a good burger go there.

Isn't it nice to have a choice?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CaMUfxVJVQ

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

#377
post #224

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It's the opposite of what you'd be doing if you wanted the system to function correctly... But what if you didn't? Because you wanted to replace it, but it was dangerous to say that out loud? The Conservatives (and to some extent some Liberals as well) have been playing a long game -- since the 70s when it was introduced -- to get rid of medicare. It's incredibly popular with Canadians as a whole, but if you take con…

I'm still an outsider (recent immigrant to Canada) but my impression of right vs left politicians here reminds me very much of Dems vs Reps in the US. 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. Then when the left obtains power, they simply maintain status quo, never improving or fixing the problems…

In the U.S., it was the left that got rid of the civil service exam.

My guess is, rules that make life harder for teachers, such as ongoing education requirements, also tend to come from some wing of the Democratic Party.

I am just trying to give some examples and not make some grand claim; I think both sides do a lot to make governance ineffective when they don’t want that kind of governance, or are having a bout of manic stupidity.

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

#378
post #343

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I don't really see how patients so severely ill that they need a bed in A&E with dedicated nursing provision could be discharged into community social care, though maybe I'm missing something...

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 unable to serve anybody who may be even more critically ill.

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

#379
post #221

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It's a failure of privitisation 30 years in the making since water and waste management was privatised in 1989 here in the UK. Of course you can lay some blame at the door of the regulator but let's not forget the tens of billions that have been siphoned off to shareholders and fatcat CEOs, some of whom are arguably criminally negligent and should be put on trial for the catastrophes that have become apparent in rece…

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.

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

#380
post #297

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>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".

You're correct that the game is to make a lot of money but the key to making that work is ensuring transactions are beneficial to all parties. It doesn't matter how you structure things you end up with some way to climb the hierarchy. The problem with pure communist systems is they try to prevent all hierarchies. Human nature attempts to circumvent this, the only way to do so is via corruption and political power. Co…

Hate to say it but even with money here in the US you can't get emergency care these days. It's all about connections instead.
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