New research shows the NHS was the world’s leading healthcare system before austerity put it in crisis — exposing calls for ‘reform’ as justification for more privatisation and underfunding.
This should be totally obvious to everyone. Even from a heartless economic perspective, properly funding the NHS more than pays for itself - people who have health issues have reduced productivity, and that means less taxes for the government, and that they end up paying more in benefits, and the impact on people’s health tends to mean that one issue becomes a much bigger issue or other issues… leading to things to get worse to a point where they can’t be ignored and it’s much more expensive to put right.
There is no good reason to continue to underfund the NHS. It is entirely ideologically motivated - despite the fact that publicly funded healthcare makes complete sense, it just doesn’t let the elite extract enough wealth from the rest of us!
But how are people supposed to profit off of that? It’s almost like you don’t want to exploit the healthcare system.
depends on what your goal is really. if your goal is to lower taxes, get the most money to your mates who have companies with new systems to sell, and eventually to get rid of the NHS then it needs lots of reform
but… but… if the money goes towards the NHS how will members of parliament party it up baby? 🍾🥂
I think at this point it needs both, remembering that the Lansley reforms have now set up a number of internal structures that were not there before and subsequent to that various fuckeries have been implemented so that the whole caboodle wouldn’t collapse right away leaving the current lot of wankers holding the baby.
I think there’s an argument for civilian administrators and managers to free up medically qualified staff to do things they are qualified for, what has to stop happening is the managers being able to dictate medical procedures to those doctors and nurses (and whichever other qualified practitioners there are.)
A similar situation is happening in universities where upper and upper middle class prats are swanning around with titles like vice chancellor and having grand ideas without any actual knowledge of how things get done in the lecture theatre.
Honestly, I think the ‘reforms’ it needs are undoing the ‘reforms’ of the last 2 decades.
Certainly that would be the first order of business but why wouldn’t you try to make positive improvements while you were about it?