Posted on 01/19/2015 3:20:27 PM PST by Olog-hai
Britain’s most senior doctor has said the under-pressure NHS may be forced to abandon the concept of free healthcare for all.
Prof. Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS in England, said there were doubts over whether the taxpayer-funded model was “sustainable in the longer term”.
He added that huge changes were needed—including less reliance on hospitals—if free treatment was to be preserved.
He told the Guardian: “If the NHS continues to function as it does now, it’s going to really struggle to cope because the model of delivery and service that we have at the moment is not fit for the future.” …
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
but it doesn't matter, because as a very famous economist said "in the long run we are all dead".....oh wait.....
So the NHS was “welcomed” by all within earshot.
Yeah right just read your own newspapers......
1-Since 1988, the surgery is probably closed and a new one opened. In the 80’s some older ones from the 30’s/40’s would still be used.
2—999 is the UK emergency number. You probably phoned a number for ‘out of hours surgery’, in that case, the doctor out on call will come. 999 is the number for serious cases, where an ambulance is needed.
It was very popular in 1948, opposition was pretty minor. You have to remember, after 1945, British people WANTED the New Jerusalem the Labour govt promised them (and to be fair mostly delivered). They wanted better healthcare, new housing, jobs, better education.
Sorry, which of my points were you replying to.
Good heavens, no! The taxes are working just fine.
I don’t see how crediting Labour with socialism is being “fair”. What happened to the NHS was an eventuality, not an aberration. There were other ways of delivering jobs, healthcare, housing and education besides the state pushing them—and where are British Rail(ways) and British Leyland today, just for two big examples? never mind the fact that US companies had to help Rootes and Vauxhall/Bedford (but thanks to Labour had to divest).
Good luck having the government deliver anything streamlined and less costly. Even in a free market, it is only a few successes that deliver any goods or services with quality and a profit. The rest fail. Government has no chance.
No, there would be a lot more competition in a free market and more successes; it’s when regulation from the top gets in the way that you end up with a “few” successes.
999 is the UK emergency number. You probably phoned a number for ‘out of hours surgery’, in that case, the doctor out on call will come. 999 is the number for serious cases, where an ambulance is needed
That is quite an example of incompetence in the British Health Care system.
In the U.S., back in 1988, if you were to call an after hours doctors number and said someone is experiencing chest pains (sign of a heart attack) they would either put you through to emergency services or instruct you to hang up and call 9-1-1.
That’s like if you called an appliance repair service and reported smoke and flames coming out of your stove. Should they direct you to the fire department or send out a serviceman?
I was a simple Airman in a foreign country. I called the number on my girlfriends NHS card at her direction. Unfortunately the lady on the other end of the call wasn’t an “expert.”
The public attitude to the NHS in Britain has tended to place it in a quite separate category from other sectors formerly in public or government ownership. The theoretical and practical advantages of privatisation have been accepted far more widely in those other sectors than they have been for the NHS. That’s why Margaret Thatcher famously (or notoriously, depending on your point of view) once said ‘the NHS is safe with us’. To have said anything else would have been political suicide, for she knew any hint of privatisation would have alienated her own core Conservative vote.
Why is this so? I think that emotionally, at least, we have tended to see the NHS as belonging in the same category as the armed forces: as part of that irreducible core of state provision which is a legitimate justification for taxation. Both have been seen as necessary to defend the people from its enemies - in the one case military, in the other biological. You would no more expect a private service to protect the nation’s health than you would a a private army to defend the its borders. Though the reasoning may not have been articulated in that way it was, I think, the assumption underlying the public attitude; and that which made it acceptable for voters who believed themselves to be consistently conservative.
Only “political suicide” due to the number of liberal Tories that wanted to keep the NHS around. Just as bad as, if not worse than, the GOP establishment.
BTW, the same liberal Tories stabbed Thatcher in the back when it came to surrendering more sovereignty to the European Union.
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