7 ms·

> Maybe teach kids in school how to use the health care system (hey, why not NHS ed alongside drivers ed or sex ed?). We should probably break the news to her

> Maybe teach kids in school how to use the health care system (hey, why not NHS ed alongside drivers ed or sex ed?). We should probably break the news to her that there is no "drivers ed" in the UK. But she is right. The NHS can be great, but the way the government is fucking with it at the moment will prove disastrous. It is education, not privatisation, those are the answers to the problems of the NHS.

arethuza 10y ago
I suspect that some of the meddling with the NHS is intended to be disastrous so that public opinion is more likely to accept profit-generating private schemes. NB Some schools (at least here in Scotland) do offer classes on the theory part of the driving test as "interest" courses. Edit: I eventually found the quote that sums up the approach that is being taken with the NHS: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” Milton Friedman Of course, the crisis that created the NHS was WW2 - I remember my father (who served in the RAF in WW2) being pretty clear that returning to the pre-war status-quo was not an option that anyone was interested in, which is why there was such a resounding defeat of Churchill at the polls when the war ended.
- dageshi 10y ago
  I think the NHS is a massive government department that uses a huge amount of money (legitimately) and absolutely no government is capable of being in power and not "meddling" with it.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    One thing to note is as this is the UK - we actually have four National Health Services, one for each country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service
    - k-mcgrady 10y ago
      Which is idiotic. e.g. if you get tests done in one country and move to another they cannot access your scans/x-rays and end up just doing them again. Waste of money but more importantly the case history is getting distorted as you're repeating it and likely missing notes the original doctors had made.
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        On the other hand... for a lot of things, NHS Scotland handles long-term healthcare better than NHS England. NHS England essentially got forced into creating a watered-down version of the Gender Reassignment Protocol a few years after Scotland implemented theirs, and from my understanding it's incredibly difficult to get anyone to follow it. I wouldn't give up NHS Scotland for the English system - and I think many Scots would agree. (And I voted No to independence!)
        digi_owl 10y ago
        As an outsider my understanding is that one of the first things Scotland did after getting the ability to do so, was to roll back may of the recent changes to the NHS. This to the point that Norwegian politicians, the nation going through something akin to the Thatcher-Blair process, went visiting.
        zigzigzag 10y ago
        Scotland can do this partly because it is heavily subsidised by the English. If the subsidies vanished I think NHS Scotland's performance would be significantly worse.
        pjc50 10y ago
        This is difficult to do the accounting on, but almost certainly not true.
      - arethuza 10y ago
        Well, that's the UK for you - we don't have single legal or educational systems either!
- tkvtkvtkvtkv 10y ago
  "I suspect that some of the meddling with the NHS is intended to be disastrous so that public opinion is more likely to accept profit-generating private schemes." This is exactly how the Tories do things: they get agents on the inside to sabotage a system, run it down, give it a bad reputation until it can be killed-off with the public's blessing. The BBC is also being sabotaged.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    The Conservatives are so brazen about it they'll even spell it out in writing. This is the Google Books synopsis for the book Privatising the World by Conservative MP Oliver Letwin: "Identifies the reasons why governments in a number of different countries have chosen to privatise their nationalised industries. The opposition to privatisation and the techniques used to overcome this opposition are also analysed." https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Privatising_the_World.html?id=PSl2QgAACAAJ https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Privatising_the_World...
    - hansjorg 10y ago
      That synopsis doesn't sound very nefarious. Does the book recommend sabotage as a technique?
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Would you class deliberate underfunding of the public sector in order to build public support for privatisation as sabotage?
        zigzigzag 10y ago
        You realise the UK has a large deficit, right? And taxes are comparable to other western countries. The NHS will never not be broke. Your position is typical of the British left but is entirely meaningless: the government could go into Greek style debt to double the budget of the NHS tomorrow and 10 years later it'd be once again constantly broke.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  That quite can be applied to the whole neoliberal process that has been ongoing since the 80s. First laden the public services with excessive regulations and budgetary constraints to make it crack, loudly publicizes the resulting failures, claim TINA on privatization/deregulation of the market, laugh all the way to the (offshore) bank.
  - dTal 10y ago
    This is indeed a classic tactic, but I'm surprised you refer to it as "neoliberal". Deregulation, privatization, and "Starve the beast" have been conservative platforms since Reagan.
    - oriolid 10y ago
      Neoliberal is effectively conservative with less guns and religion.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        "Neoliberal" is a particular economic approach within the broad umbrella of political conservatism. (In the US this is somewhat confused because lots of the Democratic Party is neoliberal, but the Democratic Party is basically a coalition of moderate left to center-right, leaning more to latter.)
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    Services like the NHS are money pits: no matter how much money they are given they will always be broke, and given the total lack of accountability inherent in the system there will always be regulations trying to improve their efficiency. Thus ANY public healthcare service, at ANY time, will be perceived by some large part of the population as "laden with excessive regulations and budgetary constraints". This is not some neoliberal conspiracy, it is the natural consequence of any system which allocates money without sufficient accountability.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  This is a classic tactic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
raverbashing 10y ago
> We should probably break the news to her that there is no "drivers ed" in the UK. There isn't? Care to explain?
- madaxe_again 10y ago
  You buy a copy of the highway code and you learn it. You then do a theory test, which has a relatively high pass mark - covers rules of the road, hazard perception, etc. Then you do your practical test. Most folks seem to fail at least once. I failed twice. I've both UK and US licenses - did drivers ed in illinois in the 90's, aged 15. Watching gruesome films didn't make me a better driver, and I remember being stunned when I was told I'd passed - we didn't even go on a public road!
  - muzzio 10y ago
    I can tell you this is pretty vastly different now. I also grew up in Illinois, and after passing the theory test you are only granted a learner's permit. To obtain a license you need 50 hours of supervised practice behind the wheel, at least 10 of those hours being at night. You're then given a practical test at the DMV where you take public roads with a designated instructor. At least, that's the process to get a license before you're 18, I think after 18 you just need to pass the practical test. And since usually the person filling out the 50 hours sheet is one of your parents it's definitely possible to just lie about it.
    - kennell 10y ago
      I am curious, what does the practical test consist of?
      - xtreme 10y ago
        In Ohio, it consists of about 10-15 minutes of driving around public roads following the instructions followed by a parallel parking test using cones. Most other states are pretty similar.
bahjoite 10y ago
> We should probably break the news to her that there is no "drivers ed" in the UK. But there is "cycling proficiency"!

arethuza 10y ago

I suspect that some of the meddling with the NHS is intended to be disastrous so that public opinion is more likely to accept profit-generating private schemes. NB Some schools (at least here in Scotland) do offer classes on the theory part of the driving test as "interest" courses. Edit: I eventually found the quote that sums up the approach that is being taken with the NHS: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” Milton Friedman Of course, the crisis that created the NHS was WW2 - I remember my father (who served in the RAF in WW2) being pretty clear that returning to the pre-war status-quo was not an option that anyone was interested in, which is why there was such a resounding defeat of Churchill at the polls when the war ended.

dageshi 10y ago
I think the NHS is a massive government department that uses a huge amount of money (legitimately) and absolutely no government is capable of being in power and not "meddling" with it.
- arethuza 10y ago
  One thing to note is as this is the UK - we actually have four National Health Services, one for each country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    Which is idiotic. e.g. if you get tests done in one country and move to another they cannot access your scans/x-rays and end up just doing them again. Waste of money but more importantly the case history is getting distorted as you're repeating it and likely missing notes the original doctors had made.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      On the other hand... for a lot of things, NHS Scotland handles long-term healthcare better than NHS England. NHS England essentially got forced into creating a watered-down version of the Gender Reassignment Protocol a few years after Scotland implemented theirs, and from my understanding it's incredibly difficult to get anyone to follow it. I wouldn't give up NHS Scotland for the English system - and I think many Scots would agree. (And I voted No to independence!)
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        As an outsider my understanding is that one of the first things Scotland did after getting the ability to do so, was to roll back may of the recent changes to the NHS. This to the point that Norwegian politicians, the nation going through something akin to the Thatcher-Blair process, went visiting.
      - zigzigzag 10y ago
        Scotland can do this partly because it is heavily subsidised by the English. If the subsidies vanished I think NHS Scotland's performance would be significantly worse.
        pjc50 10y ago
        This is difficult to do the accounting on, but almost certainly not true.
    - arethuza 10y ago
      Well, that's the UK for you - we don't have single legal or educational systems either!
tkvtkvtkvtkv 10y ago
"I suspect that some of the meddling with the NHS is intended to be disastrous so that public opinion is more likely to accept profit-generating private schemes." This is exactly how the Tories do things: they get agents on the inside to sabotage a system, run it down, give it a bad reputation until it can be killed-off with the public's blessing. The BBC is also being sabotaged.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  The Conservatives are so brazen about it they'll even spell it out in writing. This is the Google Books synopsis for the book Privatising the World by Conservative MP Oliver Letwin: "Identifies the reasons why governments in a number of different countries have chosen to privatise their nationalised industries. The opposition to privatisation and the techniques used to overcome this opposition are also analysed." https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Privatising_the_World.html?id=PSl2QgAACAAJ https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Privatising_the_World...
  - hansjorg 10y ago
    That synopsis doesn't sound very nefarious. Does the book recommend sabotage as a technique?
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Would you class deliberate underfunding of the public sector in order to build public support for privatisation as sabotage?
      - zigzigzag 10y ago
        You realise the UK has a large deficit, right? And taxes are comparable to other western countries. The NHS will never not be broke. Your position is typical of the British left but is entirely meaningless: the government could go into Greek style debt to double the budget of the NHS tomorrow and 10 years later it'd be once again constantly broke.
digi_owl 10y ago
That quite can be applied to the whole neoliberal process that has been ongoing since the 80s. First laden the public services with excessive regulations and budgetary constraints to make it crack, loudly publicizes the resulting failures, claim TINA on privatization/deregulation of the market, laugh all the way to the (offshore) bank.
- dTal 10y ago
  This is indeed a classic tactic, but I'm surprised you refer to it as "neoliberal". Deregulation, privatization, and "Starve the beast" have been conservative platforms since Reagan.
  - oriolid 10y ago
    Neoliberal is effectively conservative with less guns and religion.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      "Neoliberal" is a particular economic approach within the broad umbrella of political conservatism. (In the US this is somewhat confused because lots of the Democratic Party is neoliberal, but the Democratic Party is basically a coalition of moderate left to center-right, leaning more to latter.)
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Services like the NHS are money pits: no matter how much money they are given they will always be broke, and given the total lack of accountability inherent in the system there will always be regulations trying to improve their efficiency. Thus ANY public healthcare service, at ANY time, will be perceived by some large part of the population as "laden with excessive regulations and budgetary constraints". This is not some neoliberal conspiracy, it is the natural consequence of any system which allocates money without sufficient accountability.
gerbilly 10y ago
This is a classic tactic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

raverbashing 10y ago

> We should probably break the news to her that there is no "drivers ed" in the UK. There isn't? Care to explain?

madaxe_again 10y ago
You buy a copy of the highway code and you learn it. You then do a theory test, which has a relatively high pass mark - covers rules of the road, hazard perception, etc. Then you do your practical test. Most folks seem to fail at least once. I failed twice. I've both UK and US licenses - did drivers ed in illinois in the 90's, aged 15. Watching gruesome films didn't make me a better driver, and I remember being stunned when I was told I'd passed - we didn't even go on a public road!
- muzzio 10y ago
  I can tell you this is pretty vastly different now. I also grew up in Illinois, and after passing the theory test you are only granted a learner's permit. To obtain a license you need 50 hours of supervised practice behind the wheel, at least 10 of those hours being at night. You're then given a practical test at the DMV where you take public roads with a designated instructor. At least, that's the process to get a license before you're 18, I think after 18 you just need to pass the practical test. And since usually the person filling out the 50 hours sheet is one of your parents it's definitely possible to just lie about it.
  - kennell 10y ago
    I am curious, what does the practical test consist of?
    - xtreme 10y ago
      In Ohio, it consists of about 10-15 minutes of driving around public roads following the instructions followed by a parallel parking test using cones. Most other states are pretty similar.

bahjoite 10y ago

> We should probably break the news to her that there is no "drivers ed" in the UK. But there is "cycling proficiency"!