We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Ironic, no? Farage wants healthcare more like France, Netherlands or Switzerland, which all have a varying degree of insurance element. NHS was always a terrible way to do healthcare, which is why rest of Europe didn’t copy it
So, is it not ironic Reform party are open to at least exploring that kind of system, whereas the supposedly pro-European anti-Brexiteer elements who most depreciate Farage get the vapours at the notion of a more European healthcare system for the UK? 🤣
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
People (if any) who regularly read and meditate on my comments will perhaps remember that i insisted, some years ago, that Trump 45 did little more than make America more like Europe*. Perhaps i did not emphasize that Trump tried to imitate the European policies that i approve of, while avoiding the European policies that i dislike.
If Farage plans to do the same, all power to him!
* In this context ‘Europe’ is a term that excludes the British Isles.
Compulsory “insurance” is a TAX – whether it goes to directly to the government, or to corporations.
As for the British effort to imitate the Soviet health care system (which was set up in the 1920s – 20 years before the NHS, the pretense that the NHS was “modeled on the Friendly Society of the Great Western Railway” or “a Welsh mining village” is a LIE – it was modeled on the Soviet system), it is not performing well, but then neither is corporate health care.
Both break the central relationship between healer and patient.
The sole concern of a doctor should be the health of their patient – not whether their employer, or “professional body”, will punish them for proscribing X medicine, or NOT proscribing certain injections.
All the health “systems” in the West were exposed by Covid (both the failure to proscribe Early Treatments and the pushing of dangerous injections) because health care should not be a “system” – it should be a personal relationship between a person and their doctor.
I appreciate the money is removed from our wages akin to taxation, but that money is in effect, insurance.
Not entirely wrong, but we could perhaps distinguish between at least 3 different kinds of insurance:
* voluntary insurance: you choose whether to get insurance or not;
* compulsory insurance: you have to get insured, but you can choose your insurer;
* monopoly insurance: you have to get insured, and you have no choice of insurer.
The NHS is of the 3rd kind.
Some form of co-payments system, such as operates in places such h as Singapore and Australia, or certain European countries, makes sense. There’s still a tax-funded safety net, but most people have private insurance and a funded model. The funded point is important because people in general draw more on healthcare when they are older.
It’s not a purely classical liberal model but a damn sight better than what exists now.
If Farage really goes for this and has a detailed plan then this changes the game. Question: how does he sell this to disgruntled Labour voters in the “Red Wall”?
Stuart Noyes : I appreciate the money is removed from our wages akin to taxation, but that money is in effect, insurance.
I beg to differ. The clue is that if you don’t contribute …. you still get the NHS services. If it was insurance, if you didn’t pay the premiums you wouldn’t get the cover.
It is insurance only in the same sense that your taxes “insure” you against a Russian invasion, because the government spends (a tiny fraction of) the taxes on a bit of an army a bit of a navy and a couple of planes.
I read a comment somewhere recently saying that the NHS is underfunded and understaffed. There are people out there, millions of them, that believe this kind of nonsense. Successive governments have thrown astronomical amounts of money at the NHS based on the absurd notion that the only problem with it is that it is underfunded. They have no idea how this extra money will be spent or how it will make things any better, so it’s no surprise when it doesn’t. Better pour some more money in then.
Snorri and Lee – Having earned low wages before minimum wage came in and also raised two children, can you tell me what type would cover heart surgery costing tens of thousands as an example, i could have afforded? What about when I retire and will need the most health care during my life yet have the least income?
This is our Medicare system in the US. At 65, you qualify for basic government coverage of healthcare. If you are under 65 and poor, you get Medicaid, which is similar.
Medicare/aide does cover most things, with a deductible, and you can buy supplemental private coverages that mostly just eliminate the deductibles.
Thanks to Obamacare, insurers must cover pre-existing conditions when they sign you up. So, most of us oldsters (who are healthy) just stick with Medicare, and then buy the supplemental coverage when it looks like we’ll need a doc.
I haven’t been to a doc for fifteen years, except for e-room injuries (thanks, mountain bikes and cows!) so I am content with Medicare. Once I start to go downhill, I’ll buy supplemental coverage.
Weird system. It’s as if they have to sell you fire insurance as your house starts burning.
Medical care is expensive because it is paid for by “other people’s money” and therefore nobody cares how much it costs. And all that “we will fully fund the NHS” money that politicians keep promising? It mostly goes into administrators, partly because of all the red tape involved in getting government money and partly because when you are awash with cash you can spend it on pointless crap like DEI programs, and oppressively HR regimes, and expensive fact finding trips for people who wear suits rather than scrubs. FWIW, that is also the reason why college in the USA is so outrageously expensive.
But I have to say in defense of the NHS… at least it isn’t the American medical system. Government funded healthcare systems have advantages and disadvantages and private healthcare systems have advantages and disadvantages. The American system is a mix of both taking the disadvantages of government funded healthcare and the disadvantages of private funded healthcare. It is literally the worst of both systems.
There are lots of things to do to fix healthcare funding the world over, but they all mostly come down to two things — deregulation and competitive markets. And those are the two things that nobody wants to even consider for a second.
One simple thing that could be done in the USA is to make it legal to buy prescription drugs overseas and over the internet. That would cause the price of drugs in the USA to plummet and I suspect prices would go up everywhere else. Of course that will never happen because of the powerful medical lobby in the USA: drug companies live and die by the price discrimination made possible by international borders.
Something non Americans might not know is that the advertising of drugs is extremely common on US TV channels, in fact I’d guess they are one of the main buyers of advert space on major news channels. Why? I mean do people really get prescription drugs because they saw it on TV? I think that might happen in some small measure where they ask their doctor about such and such. However, the regulation of the ads is such that they are both extremely stupid and filled with warnings of brutal side effects. “Look this lady prancing through the field in a translucent dress. Yes, buy our ED meds and she’ll sleep with you. But be warned, take it and your skin might peel away and your dick might fall off, and if it doesn’t, its going to burn like an inferno every time you pee. But look, she has laid out a beautiful picnic for you and her pretty blue eyes are giving you that come hither look…”
But I think the real reason, or a major reason, drug companies advertise in that way is that they become major funders of news sources, and so those news sources do not want to look too hard (if you’ll excuse the pun) at the hand that feeds them.
The biggest problem is the NHS is a Religion in the UK. So, nobody else uses a similar system? That just makes us Nye Bevan’s Chosen Elect!
“I appreciate the money is removed from our wages akin to taxation, but that money is in effect, insurance.”
Not in the NHS’s case it isn’t, because not only does the State take our money forcibly via taxation, we get no rights to treatment at all. If the State decides to refuse to treat us, there is nothing we can (reasonably) do. As was recently discovered by some parents who requested that the NHS to treat their child’s medical needs but were told that as their child attended a private school, they would have to get private medical treatment as well.
In the UK you get the treatment the State deigns to give you. If you get nothing, hard cheese. There is no contractual obligation on them to treat you having taken your money, in the way a private insurer would be required to.
An episode from the generally excellent series “House” featured Lisa Cuddy, the chief hospital administrator, playing chicken with insurance companies in search of a 12% costs increase she wanted them to suck up at an annual renewal.
The overall mood was predictably one of righteous struggle followed by joyful exultation as the grey-suited insurers gave in to her preposterous demands.
Any consideration of the individuals faced with similar premium increases was absent.
Possibly on the basis of more money being available to Health providers? The “safety net” level of provision equates to the existing NHS, while the co-pay elements (which wouldn’t be raised through general taxation or controlled by the Treasury) constitute the additional funding.
My wife and I are just ordinary people, certainly not middle class, or just scraping in at the very low end if we are. Both of us have had minor operations in the last couple of years, in both cases we went private. I wonder what the outcome for the NHS would be going forward if more and more ordinary people moved towards private healthcare. Maybe the problem will solve itself with the NHS ending up just being for really poor people, like buses.