4 ms·

By "broke" I mean telling the government that it desperately needs more money or else services will start failing.

by zigzigzag 10y ago

ZenoArrow 10y ago
Fine, that's your definition of broke. How about the rest of the points from the same comment.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  I do agree that the UK spends less per head than the US does and gets more for it. But the USA has one of the world's most dysfunctional health systems. Constantly comparing the NHS to it, or worse, implying that people face a binary choice between the US system or the UK system, is a fallacy that ignores the highly capable and often very efficient healthcare systems in other countries. Which don't seem to suffer the same ills of the NHS. It's also not the case that the UK vs US comparison is one of government vs capitalism. All healthcare systems have heavy government involvement and distortion of the healthcare market, and this is fine, because developed societies always choose these problems over the much larger problem of poor people being unable to afford healthcare. PFI schemes have not been good value for money and were essentially a trick to hide the ballooning costs of the NHS from a population that can't treat the topic rationally. Unfortunately, too many people in the UK look at this sort of thing and instead of saying "wow our government is really bad at public procurement, we should give them less power" conclude something along the lines of "oh noes, they should have guessed that trying to buy things from companies would lead to disaster - the solution is a fully state run economy!" All kinds of organisations manage to procure services and investment from the private sector, all over the world, every day ... without problems. PFI boiled down to a complicated kind of loan that let Labour do what it always seems to try and do: massively increase spending on the public sector without raising taxes. No surprise that they paid a very high interest rate for such a thing.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    > "Constantly comparing the NHS to it, or worse, implying that people face a binary choice between the US system or the UK system, is a fallacy that ignores the highly capable and often very efficient healthcare systems in other countries. Which don't seem to suffer the same ills of the NHS." I'm glad you could admit that the NHS wasn't the worst system out there. As for better systems, I'm not saying the NHS is perfect, what I am saying is that it can be improved by stopping the drive towards privatisation, as this drive is making the NHS less efficient at spending money on healthcare, not more efficient. Furthermore, even with these inefficiencies, the NHS continues to offer a cost-effective service, and I don't even need to use the US healthcare system to compare it to. The UK spends less per person on healthcare than France and Germany, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h... The NHS isn't a money pit, it's a bargain. If you made it more efficient by getting rid of the privatisation efforts, it could be even more of a bargain. > "PFI boiled down to a complicated kind of loan that let Labour do what it always seems to try and do: massively increase spending on the public sector without raising taxes. No surprise that they paid a very high interest rate for such a thing." This is where your partisan bias is blinding you. PFI wasn't just popular with New Labour, it's been popular with the Conservatives that replaced them in power. If the Conservatives are supposedly more fiscally responsible, why do they continue to use expensive PFI schemes to fund government spending? http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/18/george-osborne-backs-pfi-projects http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/18/george-osbor...
    - zigzigzag 10y ago
      That article dates from 2011. PFI is being phased out. Look at the graph in section A here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/504374/PFI_PF2_projects_2015_summary_data.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... PFI reached its peak in 2007. Current number of deals being added are at the level they were at in 1995. It's worth asking why any new deals are being signed at all, but when we're down to the level of 8 per year (vs 65 at the peak of New Labour) it's fair to say that they're much less popular than they once were.

By "broke" I mean telling the government that it desperately needs more money or else services will start failing.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

Fine, that's your definition of broke. How about the rest of the points from the same comment.

zigzigzag 10y ago
I do agree that the UK spends less per head than the US does and gets more for it. But the USA has one of the world's most dysfunctional health systems. Constantly comparing the NHS to it, or worse, implying that people face a binary choice between the US system or the UK system, is a fallacy that ignores the highly capable and often very efficient healthcare systems in other countries. Which don't seem to suffer the same ills of the NHS. It's also not the case that the UK vs US comparison is one of government vs capitalism. All healthcare systems have heavy government involvement and distortion of the healthcare market, and this is fine, because developed societies always choose these problems over the much larger problem of poor people being unable to afford healthcare. PFI schemes have not been good value for money and were essentially a trick to hide the ballooning costs of the NHS from a population that can't treat the topic rationally. Unfortunately, too many people in the UK look at this sort of thing and instead of saying "wow our government is really bad at public procurement, we should give them less power" conclude something along the lines of "oh noes, they should have guessed that trying to buy things from companies would lead to disaster - the solution is a fully state run economy!" All kinds of organisations manage to procure services and investment from the private sector, all over the world, every day ... without problems. PFI boiled down to a complicated kind of loan that let Labour do what it always seems to try and do: massively increase spending on the public sector without raising taxes. No surprise that they paid a very high interest rate for such a thing.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "Constantly comparing the NHS to it, or worse, implying that people face a binary choice between the US system or the UK system, is a fallacy that ignores the highly capable and often very efficient healthcare systems in other countries. Which don't seem to suffer the same ills of the NHS." I'm glad you could admit that the NHS wasn't the worst system out there. As for better systems, I'm not saying the NHS is perfect, what I am saying is that it can be improved by stopping the drive towards privatisation, as this drive is making the NHS less efficient at spending money on healthcare, not more efficient. Furthermore, even with these inefficiencies, the NHS continues to offer a cost-effective service, and I don't even need to use the US healthcare system to compare it to. The UK spends less per person on healthcare than France and Germany, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h... The NHS isn't a money pit, it's a bargain. If you made it more efficient by getting rid of the privatisation efforts, it could be even more of a bargain. > "PFI boiled down to a complicated kind of loan that let Labour do what it always seems to try and do: massively increase spending on the public sector without raising taxes. No surprise that they paid a very high interest rate for such a thing." This is where your partisan bias is blinding you. PFI wasn't just popular with New Labour, it's been popular with the Conservatives that replaced them in power. If the Conservatives are supposedly more fiscally responsible, why do they continue to use expensive PFI schemes to fund government spending? http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/18/george-osborne-backs-pfi-projects http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/18/george-osbor...
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    That article dates from 2011. PFI is being phased out. Look at the graph in section A here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/504374/PFI_PF2_projects_2015_summary_data.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... PFI reached its peak in 2007. Current number of deals being added are at the level they were at in 1995. It's worth asking why any new deals are being signed at all, but when we're down to the level of 8 per year (vs 65 at the peak of New Labour) it's fair to say that they're much less popular than they once were.