NHS funding: Theresa May unveils £20bn boost

Discussion in 'Western Europe' started by cerberus, Jun 18, 2018.

  1. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    "The prime minister said this would be funded partly by a "Brexit dividend", but also hinted at tax rises."

    An hour or so after she made that assertion on the Andrew Marr show, a senior spokesman for the Institute for Fiscal Studies (and subsequently the Office for Budget Responsibility more or less confirmed it) said there won't be a Brexit dividend' - in fact the former said that, bearing in mind the £40b-plus exit penalty, there will be a significant Brexit deficit, so no prizes for guessing how much of that bogus NHS extra funding pledge is going to come from the so-called Brexit dividend, and how much will be from tax rises . . . which all means, of course, that she either unaware of the salient figures, or she is aware of them but is outright lying, safe in the knowledge that by 2023 she'll be long gone from Westminster, so by then it'll be someone else's 'baby'. I get so sick of hearing lies and the gesture-politicking!

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44495598
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2018
  2. Peter Dow

    Peter Dow Active Member

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    The Guardian view on the NHS cash boost: pay for it with deficit spending
    Fri 15 Jun 2018
    The public knows that the health service needs more money. Theresa May’s offer is a start – but unlikely to be enough​
    [​IMG]
    ‘Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, deserves credit in arguing for extra money. But Mrs May will find the cash because public dissatisfaction with the NHS is at its highest level for a decade.’ Photograph: POOL/Reuters

    "Finally the penny has dropped in No 10. The prime minister, Theresa May, has recognised that the English health service does not have the resources it requires to provide high-quality patient care, and has told the Treasury to “find the money” the NHS desperately needs. Mrs May seems to be offering to increase the budget of the English NHS by about 3% a year until the end of the parliament, meaning that government spending would rise from around £130bn to £150bn in four years’ time. While welcome, the sums are probably going to be too small to keep pace with the rising cost of drugs and an ageing population that has ever more complex needs.

    The decision is not an act of compassion. It is not a birthday gift – although it might be sold as such because the NHS is 70 this July. It is not because there is a Brexit dividend – there isn’t. It is because the NHS is falling apart before people’s eyes. GP appointments are harder to come by. Patients routinely sit for hours in overcrowded emergency wards. In hospitals, operations are cancelled more often, because of a lack of beds. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, deserves credit in arguing for extra money. But Mrs May will find the cash because public dissatisfaction with the NHS is at its highest level for a decade. Politics demands that she acts.


    The Tories have no one else to blame for this sorry state of affairs but themselves. Conservative ministers spent the last eight years bleeding the health service dry. Like physicians of old, Tory policymakers believed that bloodletting could heal the sick. It was wrong in medicine. And it’s wrong in economics. It has not just inflicted pain; it has made the patient weaker. Other parts of the system have succumbed: social care offered by local authorities has been decimated by austerity.

    Mrs May does not want to be remembered as the prime minister who squandered the dramatic improvements that had been achieved by the NHS. Despite the longest budget squeeze in its history, the NHS was last year judged the best and safest healthcare system of 11 developed nations. Unsurprisingly, given austerity, the NHS was reckoned to be cheaper to run than other healthcare services found in comparable economies. What the health service needs is the kind of vision that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown offered almost two decades ago when they decided to raise health spending to the EU average.

    Before spending more money on the NHS, British politicians should take the advice of the US economist Stephanie Kelton: in a UK lecture this week, she explained that it was wrong for politicians and the media to argue that the government must balance its books, just like a household. If a household were to continually spend more than its income, it would eventually face insolvency; it is thus claimed that the government is in a similar situation. This is false.

    Yet politicians are obsessed with avoiding an increase in the deficit, an impulse so ingrained that Professor Kelton described as it “almost Pavlovian”. An analysis of the UK’s economic position tells us how to fund the NHS: growth is flatlining, real wages are stagnant and there’s little inflation. The UK’s indebted households are sinking deeper into debt. Hardly the time to raise taxes. The public sector deficit ought to be seen as an instrument to support the economy, not a way to break it. To pay for the NHS, which is critical for long-term prosperity, the government should engage in Keynesian deficit spending: this would help to keep not only the public healthy but the economy too."
    :applause:
    Without doubt, the UK editorial of the year.

    Thank you Guardian editorial writer, whoever you are.

    Might you be interested in editing BBC news and current affairs? If so, you have my vote for what it is worth!

    :angel: Hallelujah! :angel:
    A UK newspaper of record finally GOT IT!


     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2018
  3. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I've had enough secondary involvement with the NHS over recent years to have been astonished at the unmitigated waste and abuse of man/woman-power, materials, and resources. But of course it's so much easier for career politicians to just keep chucking more money at it, rather than to analyze and then address the profligacy and failings, and it's an easy positive PR opportunity too, but it isn't the answer. That Guardian article, as is usual with the newspaper, is disingenuous in its naivety.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2018
  4. Peter Dow

    Peter Dow Active Member

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    Better for the government to "chuck money" at women in their nurse or NHS cleaner pay-packets than to have the banksters chuck the same money at the same women moonlighting as (or worse changing careers to become professional) lap dancers, prostitutes etc.

    No-one is "for" NHS waste and mismanagement but the answer there isn't to "spend less money" on the NHS.

    The answer is to spend less money on bad managers and the naive and bad police, lawyers and judges whom bad managers have at their beck and call to protect them from whistle-blowers, trade unions and investigative journalists. The NHS bad managers couldn't waste money if it wasn't for the state crushing democratic political action to hold bad managers to account. Newspapers are generally on the right side of that argument of holding people to account, hating it when the courts gag them.

    The missing link in accountability in the UK is the missing helpful elected president of a republic, who could defend the newspapers etc. holding bad managers to account by ordering the arrest of police and judges who were enforcing gagging orders. The reason newspapers aren't campaigning for a republic is that they are running scared of their royalist readership who have been subject to lifelong royalist propaganda brainwashing by the BBC.

    The answer to BBC royalist propaganda is to appoint republicans to manage the BBC.

    Where this particular Guardian editorial is exceptional is not in its support for more money for the NHS - which is a very common sentiment.

    What's exceptional are the final 2 paragraphs, in bold, worth taking a closer and second look at.


    It's only "Economics 101" but in its understanding of Keynesian economics, it is rare in a journalist and pretty much unheard of in the editorial columns of a newspaper of record in the UK.

    What's economically "naive" is the UK media parroting fiscal conservative superstitions that "the deficit must be cut", "the debt must be paid down" and leaving the Bank of England holding the baby in terms of having to implement very loose monetary policy to head off recession, shovelling lorry loads of cash into the money market, a.k.a. "Quantitative Easing".

    The rest of the country's net savings have to borrowed and spent by someone. Keynesian economics explain that it is better if the government borrows and invests those net savings in the country's priority needs - such as the NHS - than if the banks spend those savings on their own priorities or those of the already stinking rich and much better than if no-one spends those net savings at all which plunges the country into recession.

    Sorry if that's not easy to understand for someone who hasn't studied economics. Hallelujah! that a newspaper's editors do finally understand it.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2018
  5. The Rhetoric of Life

    The Rhetoric of Life Banned

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    I'm all for the NHS if it doesn't cost me an arm or a leg.
    The promise of Brexit meaning more money to the NHS'd probably see services not decline, but I do not think our NHS would improve, ever.
    Weeks of waiting, hours of waiting in the emergence rooms known as 'accident and emergency', life saving treatments won't suddenly become available for us all.
    Reckless spending if any part of the NHS if any part of the NHS sees any windfall from Brexit
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2018
  6. The Scotsman

    The Scotsman Well-Known Member

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    The NHS could improve if it sorted out its byzantine web of inter-related companies wasting time doing work other inter-related NHS companies are already doing
    The NHS could improve if they brought in a coherent integrated logistics IT system
    The NHS could improve if it were taken out of the hands of DOE and away from government...
    The country would have a better health system if it got rid of the current NHS model......
     
  7. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    And **** knows how much revenue disappears when it costs £75 to replace a light bulb, and twice as much to fix a door lock under the accursed PFI.
     
  8. The Rhetoric of Life

    The Rhetoric of Life Banned

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    I'm with The Nut Job on this one.

    No telling how much money could be saved with this NHS Monopoly in town.
     
  9. The Scotsman

    The Scotsman Well-Known Member

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    yeah...and not just the NHS
     
  10. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Or fewer patients.

    You can't just add more people and expect all the money for government services to materialize out of nowhere.

    We're going to have a real serious demographic crisis on our hands when the migrant population begins aging.
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2018
  11. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Of course, what they are advocating goes under the name Keynesianism, believing if the economy is a little under the weather a shot of stimulus will help it recover.
    The type of Keynesianism spelled out by Keynes originally involved government saving up money during good times and spending it during bad. Keynes never explicitly advocated for borrowing money to throw into the economy during bad times. And that raises a lot of potential questions.

    For one, the benefit to cost ratio of stimulus at the expense of taking on more debt. Two, when you borrow money it comes out of somewhere, so to some degree or in some sense that is taking money out of the economy, a bit counterproductive when you're trying to temporarily add money into your overall economy.

    Like I always ask people, if the government has been running budget deficits for so long, why does it need stimulus now? Didn't all those deficits over the years count as stimulus? Yet now we're still in a place the economy is not so good and we need more stimulus? When does it get better?
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2018
  12. Liberty Monkey

    Liberty Monkey Well-Known Member

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    Pretty certain this is just another way to say we're putting your taxes up because we're can't organise a p*ss up in a brewery.

    You can guarantee the amount our taxes go up will be more than the amount they inject in the NHS to pay for more admin.
     
  13. cerberus

    cerberus Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The truth is that this risible excuse for a 'government' either has no idea how to run a country, or they don't care. With the breath-taking farce of Brexit in mind, which is undoubtedly going to end in disaster, it can only be one or the other. I thought Cameron was bad enough, but May is the worst prime minister this country has ever had. And after 5 years of severe austerity, she hasn't even made a dent in the national debt.
     
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