I’m up for that with one caveat.
Patients should pay a fee of up to £8 for every day they are in hospital, a former health boss has suggested.
Professor Stephen Smith called on ministers to bring in charges to help cover the cost of expensive medical equipment.
The former chairman of the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust also proposed that people aged 60 and over should start paying for prescriptions.
Personally, I’ll be happy to see the end of the NHS. My recent operation was paid for out of my pension pot. I’d had enough of the long waits and failure to actually solve the problem, so I went private as so many are. It needs fixing. Sacking all the top layers of management would certainly be a step in the right direction – people just like Smith, for example. However, a semi-privatised arrangement mirrors what happens across the channel. That said, you don’t pay for prescriptions, but you do pay for GP visits. You also have to top up over the 75% threshold, so people take out insurance.
All well and good. However, if this Professor Smith thinks I should start paying for those prescriptions, there’s that caveat – you give me back every penny that you have taken from me over my working life first. Then we have a deal.
You are totally right LR. I am pig sick of paying for private operations the NHS can’t provide without waiting years.
Re-prescriptions. I’ve noticed in the last few months that I get half the pills for the same cost for some medicines. Robbing bastards.
As usual, politicians will move the goalposts when it suits them.
Here’s a better idea, how about making the hordes of foreigners constantly flying in to the UK for treatment they’re not entitled to pay instead? I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be doing that anyway. Very few are actually presented with a bill though, because according to the BMA, muh racism.
I’ve mentioned this at the Fahrenheit211 blog as well. Part of the problem with selling the idea of reforming the NHS to the general public is that it isn’t universally bad. My local surgery is a good one, they look after me managing my diabetes very well. Even when the service is mediocre, people seem to be conditioned to expect crappy service and are happy with it because they perceive it as being free. About 200 billion a year free I think it is. People who are taken ill while they are abroad are often amazed at the quality of the healthcare and, although they often have to pay, are surprised at the reasonable cost. I often tell people to compare the service that they get from the NHS with the service that they get from the vet.
The NHS is a canteen service, cheap and available. If you want anything on the menu they are generally able to provide it, eventually. Want anything complicated or stretching across several specialities then you will be obliged to shout and complain to get it sorted.
“… you give me back every penny that you have taken from me over my working life first.”
That’s the big problem with reforming the welfare state: it’s already there. People have arranged their entire lives on the basis that they won’t have to pay for healthcare or their old age. They’ve “paid in” already. Tempting though it may be, fools though they were, you can’t just pull the rug out from under them.
Except, of course, they haven’t. It’s a Ponzi scheme. Current expenditure is paid for by current income, not investments. If it were a commercial insurer, its customers would have the rug pulled from under them: it would go bust, there’d be a big scandal, people would go to jail, and everyone would have forgotten about it in thirty years or so, apart from those who lost their shirts. But, being political, that can’t happen.
So what does?
“Part of the problem with selling the idea of reforming the NHS to the general public is that it isn’t universally bad.”
Yes, I’ve said that many times. The problem with the NHS in particular is that it isn’t terrible; it’s barely adequate. It has all the problems of any socialistic enterprise – shortages, waiting lists, poor facilities, indifference to its clients – but not to the extent of total collapse. It’s amazing what people will put up with as long as something just about works.
I lived in Scandinavia for many years. You pay up to around 200 quid a year, not including taxes, for treatment, Dr’s visits etc, after that it’s free. Prescriptions for life saving medication also free.
I think it’s a good system and the nominal charge to see the doc prevents tyre-kickers whining about sprained eye-lashes from clogging the appointments book.