People may be ready to pay an extra penny on income tax to fund the NHS and social care, Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has said.
Farron said voters had reached the stage of not believing the NHS’s problems could be solved through efficiency savings and might be willing to pay more if they were convinced it would go to the health service.
That’s the problem with these people. Their solution to everything is squeezing ever more money from us. We don’t need to have more tax, what we need is to spend less of it on wasteful IT projects, foreign aid, charities, fake charities and other blood-sucking parasites. Close down useless government departments. Then, with what’s left over, spend it efficiently on health provision – if state funded health provision is the way you want to go. A French model would be preferable to me, in that it is not entirely state provided and the patient gets far more choice in provision – but that’s another argument. The argument for today is that we do not need to be taxed more while there are huge savings to be made in government spending.
So, start cutting. And Farron can stick his penny where the sun don’t shine.
Only those who’ve not had anything to do with it.
All of which is apart from the fact that a penny on income tax raises about £5.5bn in revenue, assuming it doesn’t result in any behaviour changes. The NHS budget is currently about £120bn per annum. Does anyone really believe that an increase in spending of 4-5% would result in any real change to the standards of NHS care? How many times have we heard ‘If we just spend a bit more money on the NHS all its problems will be solved’? Its bollocks. The NHS would swallow an extra £5bn pa in an instant, burp and demand more inside 18 months. Its demand for cash is limitless, because when you give away healthcare for free the demand for that is limitless as well.
The NHS needs to be fundamentally reformed so that the patient is the source of the funding, even if most of that funding comes from the government, and there are multiple private sector suppliers of healthcare services. Then you would see some changes in behaviour among the staff in the medical sector – they might have to stop regarding patients as something that gets in the way of their enjoyment of their day, and more as what puts bread on their tables, and treat them accordingly.
The NHS has become so obsessed with preventing people from ever getting sick in the first place (an impossible dream in the real world) that it’s screwing itself up quite royally. I’d like to see it returning to its core, original purpose of treating people who are already ill and getting them better. Of course there are benefits from all those screening programmes and illness prevention programmes etc in the long-term, but unfortunately the NHS is in such a parlous state that it doesn’t have the luxury of being able to look long-term right now – just as someone who is living on the breadline doesn’t have the luxury of being able to put money into a pension “for the long term,” because there are more urgent things to hand, like food or the rent. The NHS should pare away all and any of its services which don’t deal purely and directly with making already-sick people better. They’d save a fortune, which could be used to provide better care for patients. Then, further down the line, once they’d got their act together, they could, if they wished, start re-introducing screening/prevention/advice services again. But only as an add-on to their primary function of treating sick people.
Well these people already have the option of writing a cheque to the leeches at westminster and saying that they want it to go to the NHS.
An advertising campaign should do it. I won’t be paying a bean more though.
Being self-employed, I minimise my tax liability with ruthless efficiency. So, no, I won’t pay a bean more.
Another idiot politician who does not talk to voters. We all pay far too much income tax as it is. Scrap the 12 billion aid budget and close down DfID. Stop these sill database developments. Stop wasting taxes.
silly databases………..oops