General Discussion
The N.H.S is 66 years old today one small fact 44 million babies have been delivered by the NHS in those 66 years all free of charge.
@leatash - free of charge! i think you will find the costs of this service implementation and the ongoing service cost for the work carried out by these truly professional medical staff is a touch more than that. now where did i put my bucket of sand.
But what would it cost you if you paid the cost of delivering a baby from first doctors visit to delivery with no complications is about £12,000 a complicated pregnancy can be double so would folk rather pay NI OR HARD CASH?
@leatash - you obviously have an understanding of the costs of the subject you are discussing. i understand where you are coming from now. let everyone contribute to those who decide to have children! i would rather pay for private medical for my family and not contribute to n.i., could you pay for births on private medical insurance?
The problem with collective taxes for such things as the N.H.S and benefits is that a minority take liberties with the system and the rest of us have to put up with the consequences.
But of course the NHS is not just about babies a patient who requires dialysis £24,000 per year a broken leg £2-3000 heart transplant £31,635 how about a liver at £77,000. Now if your earnings where £22,500 last year you paid about £757 in NI to the NHS now thats great value for money.
Slight tangent I know but here's something that I mull around my brain every now and again which I can see is a question relevant to this thread.
Which is........ what is the difference between people paying into a public service (in this case the NHS via taxation) just in case they should need medical treatment and people paying into an insurance company just in case they should need (private) medical treatment? After all the principal is surely the same - people pay monies into a pot of money and if they need to draw on that pot of money then they can do so. Equally not all those who have contributed will need to draw down anything at all whilst others may need to draw down more then they have contributed.
See what I am getting at?
From watching the news today I think we will all soon be paying twice for the NHS, once from general taxation and then from charges being raised from things like going to see your GP. I think the days of the NHS being free at the point of use are numbered.
Would that be NHS England, NHS Wales, NHS Scotland or NHS N.Ireland you have in mind? Only ask as I believe who is liable to pay for prescription charges and who is not varies according to which country of the UK a person lives in. So ditto in the future for using other aspects of the NHS?
That would be England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have this very biased formula for funding that allows them much greater freedom at the english tax payers expense.
@Lynne - at least those who require the private medical will have contributed to that pot unlike the n.h.s. if the option to opt out of the n.i. in favour of a private medical plan was available the n.h.s would fold through lack of finance. a typical example of individiuals who drain the n.h.s are those on full benefits having large litters. getting back on subject of the original thread contents - child birth and associated costs.
If those in government have their way there will come a day when the N.H.S will be dismantled and sold to private enterprise.
@ALLEMS - not all those who would use private medical care would have contributed to the pot. what about children? and what about those who could not afford the premiums? how would they access health/hospital care?
Also let's not forget that the private sector's raison d'etre is to make a profit. So........why would the private sector be interested in taking on those with chronic medical conditions? What would the situation be, say, for a child born with a genetic condition that would take a lot of money to cure/stabilise?
And do you really think that having to pay for medical care would stop people from having large families? They might not use hospitals and gps etc but that wouldn't necessarily mean they wouldn't have large families.
Just been listening to the news. They used the expression NHS England. Didn't mention any other country in the UK.
and on this issue of the English taxpayers subsidising Wales, Scotland and N.I.. Have a read of this - it is part of an article published in The Guardian earlier this year.
"...........A giant sucking sound can be heard in the UK today: the sound of public money and private wealth being sucked down south to London. The result is the emasculation not just of Scotland, but of Newcastle, Oldham, the Midlands, and countless other places not featured on the Circle line.
The Kelvin MacKenzies of this world would have you believe that the rest of the country is subsidised by the capital. It's quite the opposite. Stroll around the centre of London: the place is a building site, full of public works. The Thames Tideway. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Crossrail, set to be the biggest construction project in Europe. All this building and jobs are being bankrolled by the rest of the country, yet the benefits go to London businesses. At the end of 2011, the IPPR North thinktank totted up all the government's spending on transport projects up till 2015. Londoners enjoyed public investment of £2,731 per head, far outstripping any other region. The north-east received a measly £5 per head.
The further out you look, the worse the trend becomes. When Howard Davies and his official commission reports on expanding Britain's airports, it could recommend building more capacity outside London and the south-east – but I'll bet you a 747 it doesn't. Then there is HS2, sold to the public as giving more economic opportunity to the Midlands and the north-west. Much more likely, as John Tomaney, professor of urban planning at University College London warns, is that "it will turn Birmingham into a suburb of London".
Every so often, the mask of a member of the establishment slips and they admit that spending is skewed towards the M25. But, the argument goes, Londoners are worth it. Remember Boris Johnson's declaration of 2012: "A pound spent in Croydon is of far more value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde." London is where the big-boy jobs are, runs this line – and the companies who create them.
Except that this ignores how the rest of the UK pays for London to enjoy that wealth. Take the public-private partnerships and PFIs used from John Major onwards to build and run hospitals, schools and transport services. Adam Leaver, at Manchester Business School, looked at 657 UK companies involved in PFI/PPP deals between 2004 and 2012. Of all these schools and other public facilities being laid on across the country, 75% of the firms operated out of London and the south-east; 83% of the revenue went to one corner of the UK.
Take St Mary's Hospital, Manchester, part of a £500m redevelopment project in that city of health facilities. The shareholders: all from London or Kent. The various legal and financial advisors: all from within the M25. Of the five contractors, only one is from Manchester.
This is no longer north v south: it's the rest of the country versus a small elite in London, on which is lavished a surplus of political attention, public funds and opportunities. Say the floods devastated not Somerset, but turned Surrey into paddy fields: can you imagine Owen Paterson waiting weeks to roll up in his smart city shoes? Count up the senior civil servant jobs outside the capital – go ahead, use all the fingers of one hand to do so. .........."
@Lynne - i understand and appreciate your wider view of the current services of the n.h.s to all, contributers and non contributers. although there is a need to understand the true state of this countries debt levels and the comittments and interest payments that come with this. the n.h.s in its current form is a top heavy beast of administrators and executives whose only goal is to cut costs and reward themselves. there is only one place the funds for government come from and that is the people of this country. there is a limit to how much you can tax a fast growing population which mainly depends on minimum wage to survive.
Has the U.K's overall gross debt been reduced over the last few years? I think not. This country is coming to a turning point for many of the services that some call free. At a point in the near future politicians will be forced to make serious decisions !
and if they are on minimum wages and with the added drain on those minimum wages of increased prices in fuel, energy, housing, food and the like they ain't exactly gonna have a lot left over to pay their private health insurance premiums are they?
I am very happy to see our taxes spent on the nhs and I think that If someone can afford to pay to insure or go private they should get some tax relief on the premiums or final bill after all it has been paid for in tax and ni then again privately and must save the N H S money
What do most people think of when you mention going Private though. I was on a company BUPA scheme for years and during that time had two minor operations. Both where carried out at NHS hospitals using NHS facilities and as far as I know NHS staff.
It isent really a seperate health scheme, its just a paid queue jumping excerise and an extra bonus for the consultant who brings in the refereals, acting as a middle man between the NHS and the insurance company providing the private health policy.
Again I see it as another form of income that the NHS badly needs allthough it would be interesting to see just how much they do get paid for accepting private patients.
Before we starve the NHS of vital funds maybe we should stop overseas aid, money for the arts,HS2,and prosecute all those multinationals who don't pay tax priorities is the name of the game.
Lynne has a valid point and something that has peed me off for years, which is why does the whole country get judged and punished for what happens in and around London. Im sick to death of hearing about their soaring house prices and their need for more and more money. Its that part of the country that caused the finacial collapse in 2008 yet they always seem to come out sqeaky clean. Their house prices are ridiculas and need to be controlled along side their cafe culture way of life that the rest of us are indirectly paying for. We shouldnt have to pay towards their choosen life style, they need fall in with the rest of the country.
In this technology driven society big businesses dont have to opperate from London or have to pay stupid wages to get staff who can do a job. What they need to do is break the mould. London isent a great place to work, its a dump and the people there need to see that.
Not everyone in London gets 'stupid wages', particularly professional engineers (and I don't mean plumbers etc who do very nicely thank you).
Professional engineers don't get a penny more than anywhere else in the country, so are actually far worse off in London, assuming they even have a job!!
As for the NHS, it may not be a perfect solution, but is still far more equitable than the alternative of everyone having to take out insurance.
Why - because 'the rich' would have gold plated polices, (no change there) but 'the poor' would only be able to afford policies (if any) that would have so many caveats so as not to be worth the paper they were written on.
If you want society to become even more divided, simple, go ahead and abolish/run down the NHS.