Can the UK afford the NHS (in its current form)?

Generali

GwylimT wrote: »

The US government spends more per head on health care than the UK.

A lot of my inlaws live in the states, my sister in law pays around $5000 a year for her premiums, when she recently broke her wrist we discovered her co-pay is $2000! Per condition.

Her insurance company wont pay for any pre-existing conditions on renewal, so now any injury they can loosely link to her broken wrist simply wont be covered.

When I broke my leg which didn't require any surgery the cost of my treatment could buy a brand new audi q7, for the premium cost I only waited 28 hours in what they call the ER. On returning home it had been incorrectly set and so I then needed surgery to break my leg again and line the bone up properly.

Let's not have the false dichotomy of US system vs NHS. There are as many medical systems as countries at least.

In Aus we spent £32,500,000,000 on state healthcare versus a spend of £115,000,000,000 in 2014. On a population basis we would have spent about £43,000,000,000 to have the same spend as in the UK and that's before you consider that Aus faces problems of people living in extremely isolated areas that just aren't an issue in the UK.

And Australians live longer than Brits.

zagubov

What we also need is a system where drug use is monitored in detail. I'd rather they dished out pacebos the way they currently dish out antibiotics. I wouldn't trust the market to handle our war against pathogens any more than I'd trust G4S to protect us from the Russian Army.

Generali

zagubov wrote: »

What we also need is a system where drug use is monitored in detail. I'd rather they dished out pacebos the way they currently dish out antibiotics. I wouldn't trust the market to handle our war against pathogens any more than I'd trust G4S to protect us from the Russian Army.

The market gave us antibiotics and almost all of the other drugs that have led to a massive increase in both the quantity and quality of life that we live now.

When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, people were old when the retired at 60 or 65. These days people in their 70s are just getting started. The free market sold us that and I am very happy to buy.

antrobus

Generali wrote: »

Let's not have the false dichotomy of US system vs NHS. There are as many medical systems as countries at least.....

That's very true.

The OP wrote of the NHS "I don't think anywhere else in the word tries to offer this service in this way". But then, nowhere else in the world tries to offer health services the US way either. The USA is pretty much the only developed country in the world that does not have some kind of universal health care.

You could argue that they are both outliers, with the US at one end of the spectrum, and the UK at the other. However, healthcare spending has increased in the UK from about 3% of GDP in 1960 to 8% in 2010, whilst over the same period it has increased from about 5% to 17% in the USA. Thus I would necessarily conclude that the US system is any better at controlling costs. I might even be inclined to reach the opposite conclusion.

zagubov

Generali wrote: »

The market gave us antibiotics and almost all of the other drugs that have led to a massive increase in both the quantity and quality of life that we live now.

When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, people were old when the retired at 60 or 65. These days people in their 70s are just getting started. The free market sold us that and I am very happy to buy.

The discovery of antibiotics can be by private or public funding, no need for ideology about it. The distribution and use of them needs shedloads more central organisation and perhaps micromanagement than currently exists.

As for that guy who bought the rights to that AIDS drug whose price he jacked up to the ceiling, there's no place for that in a healthcare system.

Thrugelmir

Tromking wrote: »

the gaps filled with cheap foreign labour.

Not cheap. Paid the same as everyone else. Nursing etc is no longer the profession it was once. Hours are unsocialable etc. Move to bank and get premium rates instead. Hence recruitment is actively made from overseas.

chewmylegoff

Unless there are some radical advances in treatment for dementia then the cost of looking after old people whom the healthcare system keeps alive but aren't capable of looking after themselves is going to be the problem in my view. As far as I understand much of this cost is off the books of the NHS.

The average life expectancy of people born today is something like 100, and about 40% of people over the age of 90 have dementia. That % will go up as the older you get the more likely you are to develop dementia, but at the moment most people over the age of 90 don't live until 100 whereas about half of those born today will.

Either we will manage to find effective treatment to make the brain last as long as the body or we will have to pay ever increasing amounts to look after people who can't look after themselves - the (real terms inflation adjusted) cost is already predicted to more than double over the next thirty years.

Personally I think that pretty much all R&D resources dedicated to curing cancers should be redirected to treating dementia. There isn't any point in extending life expectancy more and more when all you are doing is filling up care homes.

zagubov

chewmylegoff wrote: »

Unless there are some radical advances in treatment for dementia then the cost of looking after old people whom the healthcare system keeps alive but aren't capable of looking after themselves is going to be the problem in my view. As far as I understand much of this cost is off the books of the NHS.

The average life expectancy of people born today is something like 100, and about 40% of people over the age of 90 have dementia. That % will go up as the older you get the more likely you are to develop dementia, but at the moment most people over the age of 90 don't live until 100 whereas about half of those born today will.

Either we will manage to find effective treatment to make the brain last as long as the body or we will have to pay ever increasing amounts to look after people who can't look after themselves - the (real terms inflation adjusted) cost is already predicted to more than double over the next thirty years.

Personally I think that pretty much all R&D resources dedicated to curing cancers should be redirected to treating dementia. There isn't any point in extending life expectancy more and more when all you are doing is filling up care homes.

This is a fascinating subject. Until we know what to do about it, the only advice we have is get at least 6-8 hours sleep a night and, for women, don't wait till your oestrogen levels fall before you start HRT.

They reckon every third baby born now will get dementia. There's a mass of research going on now about how to get treatments into the brain.

Generali

zagubov wrote: »

The discovery of antibiotics can be by private or public funding, no need for ideology about it. The distribution and use of them needs shedloads more central organisation and perhaps micromanagement than currently exists.

The fact is that the huge developments in pharmaceutical technologies weren't discovered by public funding for the most part, they were discovered by people working with the profit motive to enrich both themselves and the people of the world. As Adam Smith said:

“Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention”

Why do you think it is that the Government has never come up with a blockbuster drug?

zagubov wrote: »

As for that guy who bought the rights to that AIDS drug whose price he jacked up to the ceiling, there's no place for that in a healthcare system.

Yeah, he's a !!!!.

[Deleted User]

As a percentage of GDP, Britain's total healthcare spend (public and private) is less than the world average, less than the EU average, and less than most first world countries (bar the basket cases like Spain, Greece, Iceland & Ireland). Not much evidence there that we can't afford healthcare.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?order=wbapi_data_value_2014+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS/countries/1W-EU-GB-XC?display=graph