I don't know how much of total cost goes to premiums. I'm not sure how it matters the breakdown of where the expenses are. I pay about £12,000 a year to my medical insurance company for my family. My employer subsidises it too or it would be more expensive... I'm not sure how much they pay. When I first entered the work force in the US I paid $16 a month my employer paid the rest... granted that was for just me... Didn't have family then. As insurance costs go up employers pay a dwindling share. On top of that I pay perhaps £150-£300 on average per simple doctors visit. If it's an MRI or something that requires an outpatient hospital visit it could be over £1000. If it requires staying overnight I shudder to think the expense. For the Mrs. to give birth cost about £2500 a pop. That includes the times the ones that died before they were born. An average prescription might run me £50 on average unless it's just a simple antibiotic. A lot of grocery store pharmacies actually give things like amoxycilin away free with a prescription to try and win your business. (pity folk with AIDS they probably pay over £10,000 a year on medications) pretty much you can expect the more crucial your medicine the higher the costs will be. If it is critical to stay alive the medicine will be extremely expensive. Potentially hundreds of £ a day. Trust me. You don't want an insurance based system in the UK. Its horrible and one bad health experience can bankrupt you. Also picture this. Your employer changes coverage plan. Now you can't go to your regular GP and wife needs to change OB/GYN to one in the new network. Happens all the time. You don't have freedom to go to the doctor you want. Has to be one your insurance company approves of. (must admit for me this hasn't been a problem). I'm not saying the NHS is good. I'm not saying it is problem free. What I'm saying is, if the NHS is broken it's still better than an insurance based system. You shouldn't want to remove the NHS you should want to FIX it.
I think that is true for most government models. Certainly, I think without market forces keeping prices low most institutions can become bloated and inefficient. The problem with the insurance-based system applied by the US is that it isn't market-based. So you have the non market based problems a national system has and then on top of that you add corporate greed. Inefficiency + greed - price accountability = a big mess.
Spot on ! Also if those who can afford to pay for private healthcare in the uk actually paid that money into the NHS then it would go some way to making the NHS function better. After all much of the private work is undertaken by NHS staff anyway. So it's basically the same staff, same hospitals funded more generously.
Are you on crack? So I pay a fortune in tax for an experience that's ****ing ****e with waiting lists as long as your arm, and I then choose to pay yet more to ensure that I don't have to wait months to see a consultant and then have a bed next to some smack rat and you think I should pay that additional cash into the same money pit I've already thrown 30% of my tax bill into for love? Get ****ed
It's mindsets like yours that ensures that the NHS remains the ****ing inefficient mess that it is today mate
Of course I disagree. I think a properly funded NHS that works to provide health care over profit should be championed.
The sad reality is that without the drive of profitability you invariably end up with woefully inefficient services, it's true across the spectrum of the public sector where there's a comparable to the private sector. In a utopia we'd have a superb health service that was both efficient and cost effective, we currently simply don't. You lost 3-0 btw mate
Thing is that the evidence says that nearly every service that has been privatised has performed worse than when it was a nationalised industry. Telecoms, Rail, Gas, Post Office etc have all performed worse since privatisation, largely due to under investment because profit margin takes precedence over service provision. (Not to mention that taxpayer owned industries have been sold off to rich private investors to make personal profit) The NHS is not a profit making enterprise, or at least it shouldn't be. It's probably he one thing that people don't mind paying taxes for. It's expensive and resource heavy, and there are always efficiencies that can be made, but ultimately if we want to measure our society by how we treat our citizens then you don't get much better than a free at the pint of use health care system.
I think you'll find that all of those industries are now infinitely more efficient than they were under public ownership. The issue of their profiteering is a separate issue, but to say they're now less efficient is delusional I agree that the idea of profit taking form healthcare is a principle that takes some swallowing, but that was never my point mate
Fair enough about the whole issue of profiteering from healthcare. But I think you need to check the efficiencies of things like the rail network, as there is a viable argument for re-nationalisation because it's been such a lash up since privatisation.
None of them really have any true like-for-like competition to drive down prices like, say car manufacturing or selling groceries do (or almost anything else). Industries with little or no competition tend to be pretty inefficient whether privately run or publicly run.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? They're a lot more expensive to the public at source and the taxpayer's purse, while making **** all contribution to maintaining themselves. We're literally paying the publicly owned companies of other countries to run this stuff and take the profits. It's ridiculous.
You're confusing operational efficiencies with the outcome for the consumers wallet. The latter is dictated by the level of genuine comeptiton, which in turn is dictated by the competency of the regulator. There's been numerous studies worldwide on the operational efficiencies driven by privatisation
Care to provide a link to one that addresses the UK directly? All I've seen is increased investment from the taxpayer to make marginal improvements and massive profits for shareholders.
I'm struggling to understand how this argument applies to a number of our privatised industries, anyway. The claim is that they'll be more efficient if they're sold off, as publicly owned companies are wasteful. They're then sold to... other publicly owned companies.
All I can say on this is what I've experienced. Having been a senior leader and governor in a PFI school I have seen first hand the corruption from private companies rinsing the public finances to line their own pockets. I've also seen the resulting stagnation their red tape and contract clauses have put in being able to move the school forward. And this is no ordinary school, it's a fck off big primary and secondary new build site which is getting royally fcked over by Cofely. What I would add however, is that having seen the contract in this PFI someone somewhere in the LA must have made an absolute mint from it as well.
Arsenal 0 v 1 Wolves HT Pixie has been absent all of that first half, when Arsenal did not have a single shot on goal. If Arsenal go on to get something out of this game, I hope you lads will give the cowardly ****ers what for!
