On 29 Feb 2016 at 8:40am Fairmeadow wrote:
So the NHS is 23,000 nurses short. What shall we do about it? How about making them pay for their own expensive training and then freezing their salaries for years on end? Well done George, well up to your usual standards of joined up thinking.
The NHS is also 6,000 doctors short. What shall we do about that? How about picking a totally unnecessary fight with young doctors training in England over pay rates for Saturday working? Well done Jeremy! That should help resolve the medical recruitment problems in Wales, Scotland, Australia and Canada.
What brilliant leadership skills these public schoolboys have. They certainly put the future leadership claims of bumbling old Etonian Boris in context. He may be a bit of a media joke, but London still seems to be up and running. Mind you, it survived years of Red Ken too.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 10:36am Mark wrote:
Indeed, it's all blindingly stupid and short-sighted. It's actually more ridiculous than the shambolic EU situation that Cameron has got himself into. When advertisements go out for a nursing post it's not at all uncommon for the post to attract zero applicants. But never mind there's an army of agency nurses out there who are quite happy to work on double the hourly rate that NHS nurses do.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 12:15pm Billy Bunter wrote:
I say chaps. !! steady on - us old school tie types aren't all bad un's
On 29 Feb 2016 at 1:44pm Darwin wrote:
There is another way.
The NHS has become as bloated as most other public sector 'corporations'.
We need to stop allowing non-nationals to have any free treatment, cut back on providing all non-essential treatment for free and start looking at the long-term alternatives.
I'd like to see the NHS slowly dissolved and eventually abolished. Replace it with insurance and paying healthcare. The population is swelling to fast so this us just survival of the fittest.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 2:02pm Paul Newman wrote:
At a glance there is currently a 35.0% pay gap between public and private sector by Median
14.5% by mean, which would take the top earners more into account but treat ordinary people unreasonably in my humble ( ONS). You can reduce this by taking account of “seniority” and skills but this is in my view rather unreasonable because like any large inefficient organisation the Public sector has an unnecessarily tiered structure . That profusion poohbahs of this and that adds to the better career progression vastly reduced chance unemployment and golden pension which would cost all of the salary in in question to purchase commercially and is funded by the tax payer to the tune of £40bn per year
I have something of a problem is rewarding ”skills “ in this context as well .In the case of Doctors they take about £250,000 of public money before holding the people, who paid for them to train to ransom. Ok,at least arguably, not everyone would be up to the intellectual rigours ( …although it is chiefly a class based selection in reality ) , still it is what it is and lets accept that Doctors may be unusually talented .
I am not convinced by any mean the same can be said of most public sector functions where , whilst the training may cost the public money , the skills, acquired might easily be mastered by a broad intake and as now risk is taken by anyone I feel the whole reward structure is unreasonably weighted against the entrepreneurial side of the economy in the first place .
Perhaps I am unfair but fairness surely must include all of society not just a privileged few. I would be interested to hear by what logic such people should be paid more and where it is proposed these fuds should be taken from.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 2:34pm Clifford wrote:
I'm sorry Paul, I'd love to know what you think, but I come here for short and pithy comments, not pretend newspaper articles by frustrated would-be journalists. I just don't read you anymore if you go over about five lines.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 2:36pm Mark wrote:
You do waste an awful lot of your time don't you Mr Newman. The fact that not enough people choose to train for nursing and that at any time on any ward about a third of the staff are agency staff being paid at a market rate speaks for itself.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 2:47pm A Person wrote:
And there you have it: the reason Hunt and his friends are doing this is because of short-sighted saps like Darwin posting here.
To Darwin: Non-nationals having free treatment adds up to an absolutely tiny percentage of the expenditure of the NHS. I'll link to the report. Up to now, the cost of actually identifying and charging "health tourists" for treatment is far in excess of what it actually costs the institution. Put that Daily Express down and look at the facts.
Have you ever spent any time in the US, Darwin? There they have just such a system as you describe. It's fabulously wasteful and where you simply don't get adequate insurance cover for serious chronic illness which is why around half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses.
What, by the way, would you do with a child diagnosed with a brain tumour born to uninsured parents in your scenario? Would they just have to die untreated and in unimaginable pain? Is that okay in your world?
(One of the results of leaving the EU will be that the million or so retired or semi-retired UK migrants to Spain will have to return. That will be an enormous relief to the health system on the Costa del Sol, where they're dealing with thousands of our own exported health tourists. Shame they won't be covered by your "insurance" either)
Check it out here »
On 29 Feb 2016 at 3:01pm Fairmeadow wrote:
Darwin: your views are your own and you are fully entitled to hold them, however idiotic they are. However, they would not get you elected here, and where (e.g. USA, many African countries) they are put into practice they kill large numbers of poor people.
Paul: You are zillions out re what most doctors earn. No junior doctor earns anything like that money. The only doctors who do are the consultants, mainly surgeons, in private practice, GP-businessmen who choose to take on younger GPs as employees rather than partners and a tiny number of consultant "leaders" with the top level of merit award. If the government thought there were too few doctors, all they have to do is train more and increase the supply (you probably follow that). Every government - Thatcher, Major, Blair, Coalition, Cameron chose not to do that because it costs a bit up front, and was not their priority. It takes 10-15 years of course, so it would be a future government that benefitted, and they all focused on the short-term. To his credit Gordon Brown stands out here - he increased the training numbers by 50%, and wanted to double them but was stopped by a combination of Blair and the BMA. Plenty of young people want to be doctors - over 20,000 apply every year for the 7,000 places available, and these include at least two perfectly good candidates for every place. Do we see George seeking to resolve the problem this way? No, we do not. He, like Blair, would rather rely on stealing doctors ready-trained from other, poorer, countries. That way of course you only get merceneries, and to keep them you have to be prepared to pay top international pay rates, more than any other country that wants more doctors than it has trained. You may have heard this argument applied to bankers, but it works for doctors too, and we actually need them.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 3:11pm Mark wrote:
It's pointless Fairmeadow, I'm afraid. He's been posting on here since the start of the junior doctor's dispute utterly made up figures about Dr's incomes. Many others have corrected him. I'm sure that he already knows that he's lying.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 4:02pm Darwin wrote:
A Person,
So, treating non-nationals does cost the NHS. So ban it. How many nurses salaries would it pay per year?
I have spent plenty of time in the US, there are decent policies out there you just have to pay for them. I'd rather prioritise my health over whimsical purchases so I'd consider it very affordable and a good investment in the long term.
If the parents aren't capable of earning enough to insure themselves then they certainly shouldn't be having children they can ill afford.
Who says ex-pats will have to return? Has the EU made a statement to this effect that I have missed? Will that also mean that all EU citizens within the UK will also have to return? Seems like a reasonable trade-off.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 4:04pm Clifford wrote:
What's interesting, Mark and Fairmeadow, is who exactly he posts these absurdities for. Anyone interested in the matter knows how spurious his 'facts' are and can refute them and then disregard them. Anyone not interested won't be bothered either way. Is it some kind of solitary auto-eroticism?
On 29 Feb 2016 at 5:35pm Christian Grey wrote:
Now't wrong with a bit of auto eroticism.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 6:13pm Paul Newman wrote:
Fairmeadow - By this admittedly ambiguous sentence " .In the case of Doctors they take about £250,000 of public money before holding the people, who paid for them to train to ransom." ..I meant to refer to the cost of training not the earnings . My recollectioin is that the average qualified doctror ( whoever that is ) earns slightly less than £100,000.
On the correct prescription for the NHS I have no fixed view but if the suggestion is that with more public money things would be better then more thought is required . There isn't any.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 7:00pm A Person wrote:
"I have spent plenty of time in the US, there are decent policies out there you just have to pay for them" Not so. I could point you to a child born with a serious congenital condition whose parents were bankrupt within five years. One of those parents actually had the best insurance available, as someone who was a senior manager with one of the best regarded insurers. So sorry: you don't know what you're talking about. (50% of all bankruptcies...)
"If the parents aren't capable of earning enough to insure themselves then they certainly shouldn't be having children they can ill afford. " This isn't an answer to my question though, is it? Their child is entirely innocent, I'm sure you'd agree. But this child must die, yes? What a desperate cruel future you propose.
I remarked on the expats, because they're busy sucking the (excellent state funded) Spanish health system dry. If they do come back here, most of them won't even be eligible for NHS health care, because they've been absent too long under the new rules. I offer them as a parallel. Or are they special cases?
Oh, and the reason no-one (not even this government) is pursuing the tiny number of "health tourists" is because it simply isn't worth doing, in financial terms. You can "ban" them all you like, but thankfully health professionals have compassion and probably would treat them anyway if the need was so great. Normal human beings don't leave others to die because they're poor, you know. Just you, and this government.
On 29 Feb 2016 at 7:58pm Englishman wrote:
What George Osborne does not keep reminding us (and this is a general trait of the Conservatives) is that the previous Labour administration under Blair the millionaire was responsible for the near wrecking of our economy; and the current "austerity" is merely trying to balance the books.
We have drifted too far into thinking that the "state will provide". It is time to get back on our feet and make this green and pleasant land great again.
On 1 Mar 2016 at 9:27am Mark wrote:
That is indeed the way the recession story was spun by the Tories at election time. Those with long memories will remember George Osborne in 2007 making a firm pledge to match Labour's spending plans.
On 1 Mar 2016 at 2:33pm bastian wrote:
I reckon that if all goes to Tory plan, and if everything we all need goes into private ownership-that is to say, insurance is payable on everything from burials to health, pensions to life insurance and school payments-we will have to be earning up to £500 a week just to cover those, then there will be the cost of living on top. Have you ever actually counted up those £25 here for internet and £20 there for basic dental care etc-they add up. Once it becomes the norm, the prices will rise, of course thta will create what is known as competition, but whta that really means is a race to the bottom-low quality at half the price.
On 1 Mar 2016 at 3:01pm Tipex wrote:
Darwin - without "non-nationals" the NHS simply wouldn't exist. A huge number of NHS employees aren't British and we'd be stuffed without their skills.
On 1 Mar 2016 at 3:48pm Kipper wrote:
Cant trust any of foreigners.
On 1 Mar 2016 at 6:44pm A Person wrote:
Why is it, one muses, that the people most likely to slaughter the English language are also the ones most likely to bang on about bluddy furriners?