Andrew Rosindell, who defected last week from the Conservatives, says he "would not object" to replacing free healthcare with a private insurance system
The NHS is and had always been incredibly efficient. Some misguided attempts to make it more efficient have backfired badly, but it still remains very efficient, although its quality has deteriorated as a result of decades of underfunding. Introducing a private insurance system would mean vast amounts of money being diverted away from healthcare, and into bureaucracy and the pockets of investors. Has Rosindell seen any US healthcare bills? Or even German ones, come to that? Taxpayers may see lower tax increases if universal healthcare is no longer covered; but their outgoings will increase massively as they'll have to pay many times more on insurance. I assume Rosindell either stands to gain directly, or via donors who are paying him to increase their profits.
If you really wanted to make the NHS more efficient, what you'd do is bring all the private services back in-house, and then you don't need to have such a massive bureaucracy managing the payments between & across units.
Before Thatcher imposed privatisation on the home care service in local authorities, the one I worked for didn't charge people for home care. As the legislation came in enforcing a charging scheme, the overheads went up way more than any income we got, and when we added in the cost of working out how much we had to pay each provider, they skyrocketed - even without the additional costs of commissioning, inspection & regulation.
If we didn't have a mixed economy in the NHS, of course, we wouldn't need Palantir's help to gather & analyse the data. Imagine the savings!
In 2010 our health service with the envy of the world. 15 years of Tori destruction has pushed it into the state it now is. It has been done deliberately by members of Parliament with interests in the private health sector among them Farage.
And his brain dead scheme of giving 20% tax relief on private health insurance would soon be wiped out by the increasing premiums which the insurance companies would slap on almost immediately if nobody had any choice.
Plus try getting insurance for pre-existing conditions and see how you get on. And try being able to afford insurance premiums even if you already have it when you get a new condition because you won't be able to swap to a different company as you will lose cover for that condition.
Anyone even remotely considering this has to be totally insane just look at what happens in the US. It is literally your money or your life.
Sorry about a couple of typos in that but obviously you can't edit it on this platform. I have very poor eyesight so I can't check until after it's on the page
Farage seems to like the US system of privately insured healthcare, which is the most costly and dysfunctional healthcare system on the planet. I don't suppose his enthusiasm for an insurance based system would have anything to do with his rich mate Aaron Banks being an insurance tycoon, would it? Surely not. 😡
Somebody mentioned possible donations to this MP from Healthcare companies and associated entities and individuals. Well the winners in that legalised bribery are Labour MP’s, including the English Health Secretary, Streeting. EveryDoctor and others have the details online.
So Labour is also a potential threat to the English NHS, which has already been considerably privatised. Scotland’s NHS not so much.
One thing politicians could do is to stop interfering, stop redisorganising, stop giving arbitrary targets, allow more devolution and listen to some of the “experts” n the field, like the people who work there, or the academics who research the running of the NHS, instead of applying political dogma unmoored to any reality.
It’s a myth that privatisation is more efficient, as the privatisations since 1979 have shown. They are very efficient at transferring money from ordinary people into the pockets of executives and shareholders. And don’t forget the great wheeze of Brown’s PFI.
Oh, and provide more money for the NHS. Money spent on Health and Care is an investment and has one of the highest multiplier effects of all government expenditure. (And Government money doesn’t come from taxpayers, it comes from the BoE)
If there is any justice in this world then we won't have to entertain this Cabbage called Farage. Who cares what he wants? His logic is flawed. Success is not about having lots of money. Success is about spending a small of money wisely. Farage is a spirits drinking, cigar smoking and will have never spent a penny wisely because he will never be a wise person, not ever. We need immigrants regardless of whether it is privatised or properly funded. We needed people to work in health service and we have not got enough of our own trained. And anyway, Mr Cabbage has seemingly not noticed that Labour have plans to privatise the bulk of it and already are. He's missed the boat because he is a hapless grifter that is work shy and boring. We already have lost our NHS so we need a plan to win the next election to keep that dork out of power and get a progressive government. A lot of focus should be on the swing constituencies but so much needs saving and investing in and we need to start talking about them, the wealthy paying their fair share. They have never paid their fair share but now they take the piss. The tax code should be rewritten by Professor Emeritus Richard Murphy. It is full of holes and patches and more holes. People exploit all systems but as they are robbing this country of being a nice place for all of us to live in. That is what Mr Cadbury was out to prove. He wanted to show that factory workers did not deserve to live in slums. He built beautiful houses for the workers, they were rented at below market rate and then finally, the workers owned them outright. At Bournville in Birmingham the grounds were beautiful landscaped and the children were catered for with safe play areas. On offer were 13 different sports and the cottages had gardens. They received free health care and were paid well. Cadbury was a Quaker. Quakers were responsible for the first ventilation in factories. It is a very sensible way to do things. If you invest in your workers mental well being, then the rewards are more than money can buy!
Trump's greedy, hideously cruel authoritarian regime should be setting the alarms ringing for British people - if they are paying attention.
His masked goons are executing US citizens, deporting hard working immigrants, including children, without due process and America has just left the WHO.
The myth that the private sector is somehow more efficient than the public sector has well and truly been blown out of the water over the last 30 years.
All the private sector is good for is extracting huge sums from the public to be sprayed liberally amongst the directors and shareholders.
In health for, for example, Wes Streeting employed the private health sector to reduce NHS waiting lists. He offered the same terms as the NHS (fixed budgets) but was forced to give them open-ended budgets because they cannot deliver results with fixed budgets like the NHS. If you give private healthcare a million, it automatically translates to <£600k after deductions for greed.
The NHS is and had always been incredibly efficient. Some misguided attempts to make it more efficient have backfired badly, but it still remains very efficient, although its quality has deteriorated as a result of decades of underfunding. Introducing a private insurance system would mean vast amounts of money being diverted away from healthcare, and into bureaucracy and the pockets of investors. Has Rosindell seen any US healthcare bills? Or even German ones, come to that? Taxpayers may see lower tax increases if universal healthcare is no longer covered; but their outgoings will increase massively as they'll have to pay many times more on insurance. I assume Rosindell either stands to gain directly, or via donors who are paying him to increase their profits.
Looks like the tide's going out on RefUK, doesn't it?
Watching the polls with interest.
If you really wanted to make the NHS more efficient, what you'd do is bring all the private services back in-house, and then you don't need to have such a massive bureaucracy managing the payments between & across units.
Before Thatcher imposed privatisation on the home care service in local authorities, the one I worked for didn't charge people for home care. As the legislation came in enforcing a charging scheme, the overheads went up way more than any income we got, and when we added in the cost of working out how much we had to pay each provider, they skyrocketed - even without the additional costs of commissioning, inspection & regulation.
If we didn't have a mixed economy in the NHS, of course, we wouldn't need Palantir's help to gather & analyse the data. Imagine the savings!
In 2010 our health service with the envy of the world. 15 years of Tori destruction has pushed it into the state it now is. It has been done deliberately by members of Parliament with interests in the private health sector among them Farage.
And his brain dead scheme of giving 20% tax relief on private health insurance would soon be wiped out by the increasing premiums which the insurance companies would slap on almost immediately if nobody had any choice.
Plus try getting insurance for pre-existing conditions and see how you get on. And try being able to afford insurance premiums even if you already have it when you get a new condition because you won't be able to swap to a different company as you will lose cover for that condition.
Anyone even remotely considering this has to be totally insane just look at what happens in the US. It is literally your money or your life.
Sorry about a couple of typos in that but obviously you can't edit it on this platform. I have very poor eyesight so I can't check until after it's on the page
Farage seems to like the US system of privately insured healthcare, which is the most costly and dysfunctional healthcare system on the planet. I don't suppose his enthusiasm for an insurance based system would have anything to do with his rich mate Aaron Banks being an insurance tycoon, would it? Surely not. 😡
Somebody mentioned possible donations to this MP from Healthcare companies and associated entities and individuals. Well the winners in that legalised bribery are Labour MP’s, including the English Health Secretary, Streeting. EveryDoctor and others have the details online.
So Labour is also a potential threat to the English NHS, which has already been considerably privatised. Scotland’s NHS not so much.
One thing politicians could do is to stop interfering, stop redisorganising, stop giving arbitrary targets, allow more devolution and listen to some of the “experts” n the field, like the people who work there, or the academics who research the running of the NHS, instead of applying political dogma unmoored to any reality.
It’s a myth that privatisation is more efficient, as the privatisations since 1979 have shown. They are very efficient at transferring money from ordinary people into the pockets of executives and shareholders. And don’t forget the great wheeze of Brown’s PFI.
Oh, and provide more money for the NHS. Money spent on Health and Care is an investment and has one of the highest multiplier effects of all government expenditure. (And Government money doesn’t come from taxpayers, it comes from the BoE)
If there is any justice in this world then we won't have to entertain this Cabbage called Farage. Who cares what he wants? His logic is flawed. Success is not about having lots of money. Success is about spending a small of money wisely. Farage is a spirits drinking, cigar smoking and will have never spent a penny wisely because he will never be a wise person, not ever. We need immigrants regardless of whether it is privatised or properly funded. We needed people to work in health service and we have not got enough of our own trained. And anyway, Mr Cabbage has seemingly not noticed that Labour have plans to privatise the bulk of it and already are. He's missed the boat because he is a hapless grifter that is work shy and boring. We already have lost our NHS so we need a plan to win the next election to keep that dork out of power and get a progressive government. A lot of focus should be on the swing constituencies but so much needs saving and investing in and we need to start talking about them, the wealthy paying their fair share. They have never paid their fair share but now they take the piss. The tax code should be rewritten by Professor Emeritus Richard Murphy. It is full of holes and patches and more holes. People exploit all systems but as they are robbing this country of being a nice place for all of us to live in. That is what Mr Cadbury was out to prove. He wanted to show that factory workers did not deserve to live in slums. He built beautiful houses for the workers, they were rented at below market rate and then finally, the workers owned them outright. At Bournville in Birmingham the grounds were beautiful landscaped and the children were catered for with safe play areas. On offer were 13 different sports and the cottages had gardens. They received free health care and were paid well. Cadbury was a Quaker. Quakers were responsible for the first ventilation in factories. It is a very sensible way to do things. If you invest in your workers mental well being, then the rewards are more than money can buy!
Trump's greedy, hideously cruel authoritarian regime should be setting the alarms ringing for British people - if they are paying attention.
His masked goons are executing US citizens, deporting hard working immigrants, including children, without due process and America has just left the WHO.
The myth that the private sector is somehow more efficient than the public sector has well and truly been blown out of the water over the last 30 years.
All the private sector is good for is extracting huge sums from the public to be sprayed liberally amongst the directors and shareholders.
In health for, for example, Wes Streeting employed the private health sector to reduce NHS waiting lists. He offered the same terms as the NHS (fixed budgets) but was forced to give them open-ended budgets because they cannot deliver results with fixed budgets like the NHS. If you give private healthcare a million, it automatically translates to <£600k after deductions for greed.