Katie Morley is the Telegraph’s “Consumer Champion”. People who feel they have been mistreated by companies write to her and she puts their tales of woe in the paper and threatens the company with even more bad publicity if they won’t put things right. Her articles usually end with a line about how So-and-so company has issued a full refund and apologised.
Usually, but not always. Her most recent piece was this one:
‘I spent £27,000 on a cruise I can’t afford, and Cunard won’t give me a full refund’
Her anonymous correspondent says,
Back in early 2022, I had a serious health scare. While waiting for an operation, I decided that I needed something to look forward to. Both my wife and I love to travel and so, on the spur of the moment, I decided to use our savings to book a £27,000 cruise around the world.
I put a £1,500 deposit on a Cunard World Cruise in 2024 on the Queen Victoria. I thought a trip like this would compensate for everything we missed during the pandemic.
In the meantime, friends asked us to join them on a Christmas cruise in 2022, also on the Queen Victoria. We thought this would give us the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the ship. However, the whole trip was a disaster from the moment we embarked.
After listing some of the things wrong with this ‘preparatory’ trip on the Queen Victoria, the writer finishes by saying,
We then realised that we could not spend three months aboard the Queen Victoria. Also, as a result of the economic downturn, our savings had reduced drastically and we no longer had the money to pay for the cruise. We are both retired NHS workers and live on our pensions so we decided that we would have to cancel.
As soon as we got back from the cruise in January 2023, we contacted ROL, which we had booked through, saying we wanted to cancel. We were shocked and disappointed when Cunard said that we could cancel without losing our £1,500 deposit, but we would have to book a future cruise for the equivalent amount of money (£27,000), or alternatively, a number of cruises adding up to this total.
Ms Morley did express sympathy for the writer’s health and financial troubles, but her sympathy did not extend to taking up the cudgels on his behalf. She wrote,
…you say you can no longer afford this cruise, yet when I asked, you said you and your wife’s NHS pensions were guaranteed defined benefit arrangements which are still in place. So what had changed since you booked the £27,000 cruise, I asked? You told me you’d invested a significant sum in Vodafone shares, which had tanked, causing you to lose half your money.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but your stock market misfortunes have absolutely nothing to do with Cunard and, as such, I was not prepared to ask it to break its terms and conditions because you had a disastrous flutter and can no longer afford the cruise you booked. If you really can’t go on the world cruise or book alternatives, then I’m afraid you’ll just have to swallow this £1,500 loss and put it down to experience.
What really interested me was the response from the Telegraph readers. I expected them to support Cunard, and they did, but I had not expected so many of them to specifically resent the way that the writer had attempted to garner sympathy by mentioning that he and his wife were retired NHS workers.
The most recommended comment was by Roger Sidney and said, “Love the bit about ‘we are retired NHS workers’. Come one everyone, give ’em a clap!” Someone called Mytwo Penneth said, “Former NHS workers booking £27k cruises and speculating on shares. Then they have the brass neck to get KM involved in an attempt to recover a deposit.” Brian Gedalla said, “Nice to see some backbone from Katie. You could have played “Entitlement Bingo” with this one. Like Roger below, I laughed out loud when I got to the “we are retired NHS workers” line.” There were many other similar comments.
Although I have long since ceased to believe that a command economy is a good way to arrange a nation’s healthcare, my own experiences with the National Health Service have been good. Those people I know who work for it are hardworking, and I did clap during the pandemic, and meant it. My view that it would be desirable to privatise the NHS is only shared by about 2% of British people. Even among Telegraph readers, the great majority still support the NHS model. I do not think that the anger in these replies was motivated by hostility to the NHS per se. But something has changed in Britain when so many refuse NHS workers the automatic deference that this pair clearly expected to receive.
Would it have changed anything had the couple written “we are both retired Royal Navy sailors” or “we are both retired Metro police crime scene technicians” or or “we are both City of Taunton building code inspectors” any other public sector employees or is there some special hatred for NHS workers due to their “they’re the real heroes of the 21st century” spiel they rolled out for themselves? We got the same crap on this side of The Pond, but if anyone here were to say “we are both retired employees of the University of Virginia Health System” people here would say “and?”
Many years ago I had a minor accident involving a car that didn’t stop at a stop sign and ran into me. Part of the drivers defense was that she “worked for the BBC”, as if that made her incapable of telling lie. The magistrate was having none of it. True story.
I think that the majority of British people approve of the IDEA of the NHS but having seen the way that it has failed them over the last 3 years plus the ongoing strikes has opened their eyes. But the Tik Tok dance videos would make Arlene Phillips green with envy while people have died waiting for tests for cancer, life saving operations etc. and now there is a waiting list of – if you believe them – of over one million. Well worth the amount of cash that it consumes? Unlikely.
It is blatantly run for the benefit of the NHS itself and a by-product of the system is that people are given some medical attention. Not necessarily good treatment but so what? Where else can you go? It is a take it or leave it proposition.
Sure she didn’t mean that she is unable to see what is right in front of her? 😉
bobby b,
I didn’t think of it at the time but now I realize she may have meant ” I’m a loyal party member and he isn’t.”
Another instance of this is the term “public servant”, as if their “service” is more noble than the guy who sells gas at the gas station or writes programs to keep the electric grid running. Politicians in particular make me sick with this. “Joe Biden has been in public service for fifty years”, as if he chose to work in something like a charity or non profit, eschewing his own personal advancement to instead help his country. When in fact what it actually means is “he has had his snout in the trough for fifty years, and hasn’t done a productive day’s work.” Our incurious press seems to have no interest in how this “public servant” some how is a multi-multi-millionaire. Of course Biden is just one example of the whole class of blood sucking vampires.
And the one that REALLY drives me nuts is that idea that someone who has worked for the government retains their highest title after they leave. Ambassador Clinton, President Trump, Governor Haley, Senator Feinstein. None of them have this job any more. It is like a title of nobility, and everyone bows down to these people like they are a minor aristocrat. These are jobs, not titles. I don’t go around calling myself Programmer Fraser.
These people are such narcissistic, self aggrandizing pompous asses. It should terrify us all that these sorts of people are in charge. I was thinking about this when it came to the GOP debate recently, with “Governor” Haley rounding on Ramaswamy (or should that be CEO Ramaswamy?) for his lack of foreign policy experience. I was disappointed that Vivek didn’t respond as he should — given the total disaster of american foreign policy for the past fifty years, I would have thought she should hide her involvement in shame rather than wearing it as a badge of honor.
What was that truism Jesus said?
Oh,yes, the servant is not greater than the master.
The greatest problem we have with our public servants is that they think they are greater than their masters.
The original idea of the NHS was great. People who couldn’t afford to see a doctor or attend a hospital could now do so. But the NHS has grown like topsy and dumped some services back on the public. Most GPs no longer remove ear wax, most opticians find no demand for NHS spectacles, many people now ‘go private’ for dentistry, osteopathy, and hearing aids.
Nevertheless people still report exceptional treatment… although the stories of poor or disastrous treatment are getting to be more common. The NHS always had feet of clay but the clay now creeps higher up the legs – and there’s not a lot people can do about it. But examples of how other good health services are run (e.g. France) are now getting some awareness. The time is coming when the NHS will have to be completely reorganised (not just changing nameplates on doors or departmental signage) or stopped and rebuilt from a different model entirely. The question is will any political party be brave enough?
The NHS is crap. We all know it but like everything else those that don’t use it hope that it will be there for them when their turn comes. It won’t be. I find it difficult to believe that only 2% want to change it when almost everyone I know has some story about waiting for a GP or someone being in hospital being mistreated.
“I find it difficult to believe that only 2% want to change it when almost everyone I know has some story about waiting for a GP or someone being in hospital being mistreated.”
Absolutely. I don’t know where the quoted 2% figure comes from, but I am completely convinced there is a significant undercurrent of anti-NHS sentiment in this country that is increasing rapidly, mainly due to people’s increasingly chaotic healthcare interactions with the NHS. This sentiment is ignored by the MSM and the political class, rather in the same way they ignored the anti-EU sentiment prior to Brexit. They just pretended it didn’t exist, or that the people holding such views were cranks. In the case the NHS they can add active malevolence to anti-NHS ideas – you obviously want to kill Granny!
Eventually this anti-NHS political sentiment will find an outlet, and the fallout when that is no longer hidden will IMO be greater than that from Brexit. If you thought that was an acrimonious debate, imagine what it’ll be like when the UK State religion of the NHS is potentially on the chopping block.
Lord T and Jim, a significant and rising number of people are dissatisfied with the NHS – but when you suggest privatising it entirely, they nearly all get cold feet. They want it to work on the same model as it does now, but better.
I, and I expect most here, think that wish is another example of the phenomenon described by Milton Friedman in his 1973 essay about the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with the title “Barking Cats”:
Friedman made the point extremely well, but I note that half a century later the FDA is still in existence. The inertia is even greater for “Our NHS” than for the not-particularly-beloved FDA. However, the number of NHS-sceptics is rising. I didn’t pluck my 2% figure out of the air. Several years ago I participated in a YouGov poll which asked what the future of the NHS should be. I answered something like “privatise it entirely”. When the results were published a few days later I saw the 2% result and was simultaneously amused and depressed to see how small a minority I was in. But I believe more recent polls have shown a steep rise in those “slightly” opposed to the whole idea of a National Health Service, although those “very” opposed to it are still only about 3%.
I was recently massively over charged for some gardening work – work that I agreed to in order to please the neighbours. But the fault is entirely mine – I should not have agreed, but I did agree (to stop the complaints). In the case of these people – they agreed to a cruse (at more than ten times what I spent on the gardening work) and must now pay up. What job they used to do is irrelevant – utterly irrelevant.
As for the NHS – the, mainly, Corporate healthcare of the United States has its own problems (especially as the corporations are joined at the hip with government, the American “market” is saturated with insane regulations and massive government, tax-money, funding) – but in both the United Kingdom and the United States it is still legal to pay a healer or healers directly, not so (I am told) in the case of Canada.
Katie Morley’s columns are sometimes interesting (like the one in the OP) but also tediously predictable: there is always a shroud-waving aspect. Her replies so often begin with “I’m so sorry your cat/dog/grandmother/baby died just before this happened,it must have been awful for you…”. Maybe she or her editor thought “we are retired NHS workers” would garner the sympathy vote in the same way; they won’t make that mistake again, I imagine.
The column was much better in the (somewhat distant) past when written by someone who called herself Jessica. She investigated, and often managed to resolve, genuine and occasionally alarming instances of poor service or contempt for customers, but without playing on the sad violins so much.
@Natalie
This bit of the Friedman quote is interesting:
As a natural scientist, you recognize that you cannot assign characteristics at will to chemical and biological entities […]
In 1973, that was a truism, but in 2023?
“I didn’t pluck my 2% figure out of the air. Several years ago I participated in a YouGov poll which asked what the future of the NHS should be. I answered something like “privatise it entirely”. When the results were published a few days later I saw the 2% result and was simultaneously amused and depressed to see how small a minority I was in.”
Equating the number of people who want to ‘privatise’ the NHS with the number of people who want the NHS to change into something that works is not really fair. Privatisation of the NHS is seen by just about everyone as code for ‘having the same sort of healthcare system as America’. Which is not surprising as one of the main bits of MSM/political class propaganda on the NHS is that there are only two versions of healthcare any country can have, the NHS or the USA’s version.
You don’t even have to ‘privatise’ the NHS to start the implementation of a European style healthcare system, just directing the flow of money via the patient rather than going straight from State to NHS would be a start. I think the number of people who would support that would be significantly higher than 3%, possibly 10 times as high.
You can’t quite get to “Making an effective bureaucracy is as hard as solving the halting problem” like this, but you can get surprisingly close.
Unfortunately, even if we got there, we’d have to deal with people who think the conclusion means a contradiction in our assumptions.
“…there are only two versions of healthcare any country can have, the NHS or the USA’s version.”
Elswhere a commenter strongly implied that this was the case. I suggested doing a search on the phrase ‘false dichotomy’.
Most of the NHS already *is* privitised. GPs, dentists, opticians are all private contractors.
Stonyground – absolutely.
The idea that the only two alternatives in healthcare are statism and corporatism (and indeed corporations who are joined at the hip with government, by vast American taxpayer funding and endless regulations promoting guild restrictions and corporate cartels) is false.
Of course Jim was not falling victim to this false dichotomy – he was denouncing it as propaganda, which it is.
Part of the drivers defense was that she “worked for the BBC”, as if that made her incapable of telling lie.
I should have thought “incapabable of telling the truth” would be the natural inference.
I am one of those weak and feeble folk who does not favour privatising the NHS. Like Natalie my few brushes with the NHS over the past three decades have been either mildly positive or neutral, but that’s hardly the point. I know perfectly well that it’s quite capable of being awful.
But I don’t know what to replace it with. The trouble wiv yer elf services is that there’s a huge disparity in demand from person to person. Some oldies gracefully drop dead after a very brief illness and cost nothing to prop up. Some linger on forever, costing a fortune. And most non oldies barely need elf care, except for the occasional pregnancy, while some have long and expensive troubles. And consequently those folk are also poor and in the worst position to pay for their own care.
It’s not like groceries, where to the nearest decimal point, demand is roughly equal person to person. Thus health has an enormous welare problem. A small number of people need a huge amount spent on them. You might say that this sounds just what insurance was invented for, and that’s true. But many of the sickest couldn’t even afford insurance premiums, and the experience of the US of admittedly ferociouslty regulated insurance is hardly encouraging.
So if you feel like you’ve really got to privatise some large part of the state apparat, please start with education. There the basic structure of the market is in your favour. There’s a good steady demand across the population. The welfare issues are easily dealt with by vouchers or tax credits, the whole system is crying out for the dissolution of the LEA monopolies – and there’s loads of substitute methods of provision. Education is not even slightly a natural monopoly.
Once you’ve done education properly, then I’ll listen to your health proposals.
Lee Moore
Once you’ve done education properly, then I’ll listen to your health proposals.
In a sense you are right and I’m all for the privatization of education, and it does seem, procedurally if not politically, pretty simple.
But healthcare is easier than you think. The American system could be awesome with just a few tweaks. The idea that it is a free market is just a damnable lie. I just read an example of this — the implanted contraceptive Norplant isn’t available in the United States because the manufacturer isn’t willing to take on the massive risk of litigation: they have already lost millions on it.
The cost of medication is sky high because you can’t buy it from overseas to equalize international markets. The regulatory burdens on insurance companies are almost insurmountable unless you are a massive, plugged into the government lobbying/gravy train, circut. And it forces insurers to cover everything from band aids to sex change operations, to long term cancer care. The FDA makes the production of medicines and medical devices so extraordinarily expensive and delayed that prices have to be sky high, or stuff just doesn’t get done. And the result, from the studies I have seen, is that the number of people dying due to the lack of availability of a medicine that is already widely available overseas, is dramatically larger than the number of people dying from adverse effects of prematurely approved medicines (covid related medications excepted, or course.) And I could list a dozen other things. And don’t even get me started on patents which the evidence seems to show DECREASE innovation rather than the reverse.
I remember one time I was in a hospital here (for a minor test), and talking to the nurse about this. He picked up a plastic tube that is used to connect a urinary catheter to a bag (thankfully not to connect to me!) and explained that the hospital bills the insurance company $300 for it, for a non sterile tube that I could buy at home depot for fifty cents. There was a huge backlash here when someone started pricing epi-pens at $700. To be clear, and epi-pen is ten cents of medicine in a spring loaded syringe. They should cost $5, or two for $7.99 at Walmart.
My observation is that healthcare stuff costs easily 10, and often 100 times as much as you would expect in a free market of healthcare. So, if a typical insurance premium for a single person is $2,000 a month now, and instead, with free market, it was $100 a month, they whole dynamic would be completely different.
Of course, not that any of this could happen, even here in the US where the trend is toward more government control. And as for the NHS? It is an organization run for its own benefit that dispenses mediocre healthcare to justify its existence. As with all such organizations, there are lots of great doctors and nurses… it is the people who run it who are destroying it.
I wonder if the relatively rich Mandarin class of Chinese government employees used to speak in terms of “service to my country/the people”?
That’s what government employment has once again become – a very favored and protected class of highly-paid, nicely-pensioned mandarins with great connections.
Holding out your government employment as some signifier of merit will now draw derision and anger – as it should. “I work in the NHS” should draw the same reaction as “I work for the Department of Motor Vehicles.” Both should severely limit your social opportunities.
“But I don’t know what to replace it with. The trouble wiv yer elf services is that there’s a huge disparity in demand from person to person. Some oldies gracefully drop dead after a very brief illness and cost nothing to prop up. Some linger on forever, costing a fortune. And most non oldies barely need elf care, except for the occasional pregnancy, while some have long and expensive troubles. And consequently those folk are also poor and in the worst position to pay for their own care.”
If only we had examples of other healthcare systems that aren’t the NHS or the US system that also manage to not have the poor and elderly dying in the streets…….whats that you say – there’s countries in the world with healthcare systems that aren’t the NHS or the US system? No don’t be stupid, everyone knows other countries healthcare systems are just an illusion invented by people who hate the NHS.
It certainly doesn’t help that US hospitals must provide care for the 50 million+ illegals that hopped the border and have no insurance. Never mind the diseases and injuries (drunk driving is a serious problem for our Latino border jumpers and of course gangs and the violence they bring), but they don’t pay their bills and use ERs as walk in clinics and use up a ton of medical resources. Those costs get passed on to everyone else. Of course, so do the costs of legal Americans who can’t/won’t pay their medical bills. Hospitals write off those expenses to get them off the books, but that’s one of the reasons you end up paying 30 for an aspirin while you’re in the hospital.
And of course drug costs are high because it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion dollars to develop a new drug and get it approved and on the market. Part of that cost covers drugs that don’t make it, and of course Americans eat a lot of that cost when it does make it and have to subsidize foreign countries who set the price they will pay and use the threat of simply manufacturing it themselves as a generic to get the pharmaceutical companies to play ball.
I always thought it was funny during the Obamacare (oh, I forgot that now it’s ACA since the cracks are showing and we mustn’t sully his legacy) debates the people on the right yelling about Death Panels and rationing of healthcare as though that doesn’t happen with insurance. If your doc wants you on a new drug and the insurance doesn’t want to pay for it, they just say no. You doc can appeal and go through the Prior Authorization and all of that, but if they don’t want to pay they won’t. Need a procedure and a case manager and a beancounter look at it first and if they don’t think it’s warranted (or it’s too expected for the outcome or life expectancy of the patient) and they say “no”. How is that any different than a bureaucrat in DC deciding?
Jim – I believe, in spite of me being an old sawdust head. I understand what you are saying, but (alas!) it would fly over the heads of many people.
For example, when you say “other countries healthcare systems are an illusion invented by people who hate the NHS” I believe you are attacking the absurdity that the American and British systems are the only options, but a lot of people would say to themselves “see Jim understands that the NHS is the only alternative to the poor dying for lack of medical care”.
And such people would not just be the “uneducated” – they would include many of the “educated”.
For example, I was (a few days ago) watching on television the “Great Classicist” Mary Beard – the lady was talking about the vast population of the City of Rome during the Roman Empire.
Hundreds of thousands of people dependent on the grain dole and other aid – draining the Roman farmer taxpayers and cutting people (and society) off from economic development, why get a job, that would be working for someone else – like a slave!, when one could get benefits from the state?
But there was none of this from the “Great Classicist” – to the lady the problem with Ancient Rome was “lack of social services”, she actually said that.
The problem with “Bread and Games” was that it was not enough – it should have been more.
So much for the “educated”.
“How is that any different than a bureaucrat in DC deciding?”
At least the insurance bureaucrat will base his decision on money, which has a harsh but consistent internal logic. The DC bureaucrat will decree you you can’t have it, and tell its for your own good to boot……..its a version of the CS Lewis quote:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/19967-of-all-tyrannies-a-tyranny-sincerely-exercised-for-the-good
Also, the insurance company must provide some kind of value lest people cease to purchase its services. There is no such necessity for government services (indeed, this is the root of a lot of the issues with the NHS).