Best Of

Can @Foxy (or anybody else) tell me the difference between an Out Patient and a Day Patient at a hospital, and how to tell easily? eg Will the letter be different?

I was in for an eye injection the Sunday before last - the actual procedure took a couple of hours all in plus waiting time plus recovery, and was a little bit involved in terms of eye drops (about 6 different lots) and examinations.

It's moderately consequential, as I have a policy which pays me £100 each time I am an in patient or day patient. So if it is day patient I get to make a claim, and it's a course of 5 injections at 4 week intervals.

I think I'm probably on the wrong side of the line here, but it's worth a check given the £500.

Technically it is an outpatient procedure, but the boundary can be a bit blurred.

Particularly in ophthalmology ?

Suspect this all gets quietly reversed if a Democrat (or a sensible Republican) wins the next election.

No it won't. There are decades-long strategic reasons why USA is disconnecting from Europe and pitoting to the Pacific and a tripolar world. This tendency was obvious even under Biden. Trump's successors will not reverse this trend and we need to work out how to cope.

Before Biden. Obama basically said it outright - the Pivot to the Pacific

If you come to the Indo-Pacific - and I am right now staring across a modest chunk of it on soi Nana, Klong Toei, Bangkok - then you realise why. All the energy is here, the buzz, the ideas, the innovation, the oooomph, despite the often dire demographics

America has a vast Pacific coastline and is very much part of this

Europe is not. We are the museum continent. We will become the Venice of the world

The pivot to the Pacific is fine; what is not fine is ripping up your treaty (NATO) reliability without proper planning.

As to Europe being a museum, I take a different view. There are quite a lot of people all over the world who would think that to be born in UK, France, Germany, Italy and a number of other European countries is to have drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life. I am one of them. And I think my (currently) five young grandchildren, all born and living in the UK, have been born into new challenges, but are still all lottery winners.

Labour is apparently the worst government in history and yet is still tied in the majority of polls. I do think their strategy of getting the unpopular stuff out of the way early was right.

However, they should have also used that burned political capital to get rid of the triple lock for good.

They are on core vote. As is the Conservative Party.

If they can’t change the mood music by getting some actual results, they are heading for an epic pounding.

The nation’s voters don’t see the genius in being told that their taxes are going up and bin collections are moving from bi-weekly to once a month. Yes, this may or may not be the fault of the national government, but that’s who gets the blame.

They ARE getting results though. Waiting lists are dropping.

The nation’s voters will look at the options available and it’s either Reform or Labour. Labour will almost certainly be re-elected.

Almost certainly true, but with a majority of 17 rather than 174. If they're lucky.

Labour's problem is that they think they can make incremental changes to a broken system and have it pay off. They can't, and it won't. You're mentioning waiting lists - they won't get the credit for wait times being slightly shorter when you can't see a GP and hospitals remain in crisis with a drastic shortage of beds and medical staff.

I'm curious as to who these people who are unable to see a GP are.

I've never had a problem in getting a GP appointment (or dentist for that matter) and nor has anyone I know.

While according to the official bodies there are over 350m GP appointments per year with this number having increased in recent years.

So an average of five GP appointments per person per year.

Considering that many people never or rarely need to go to their doctor it would suggest others have season tickets to theirs.

Remember the context - we're talking about "facts", not facts.

Two contradictory positions are true:
There are more GP appointments being made available
There are is a shortage of GPs, especially in localised pockets

Because the NHSes are shit sandwiches, there is both more appointments available in each nation and a catastrophic inability to see *my* GP at *my* practice. And because most people see a GP infrequently, they don't have the lived experience to disprove the narrative that you can't see a GP.

Its the 'it takes months to renew your passport' bollox on a bigger scale.

Well Labour were happy to peddle 'Broken Britain' bollox in opposition so they will now have to deal with it in government.

But *it isn't bollocks*. You want to tell the people who genuinely struggle to see a GP that its bollocks? Where their local practice opens the phone lines at 08:30, it's endlessly engaged and as and when you get through they offer an appointment weeks away?

This is why the system is fundamentally broken and needs significant reform. The patient interface is set at a local level and for so many people its desperately poor, regardless of the national statistics that politicians sneeringly recite.

Reform face a serious choice, if it is correct that USA continues down its bizarre path to oligarchic gangster autocracy. Just look, for one example, at who now heads FBI - both head and deputy. (Here's hoping the backlash is effective).

There are votes for a party linked with Trumpism, but also an upper limit. Also, as with Germany, others won't play with them in the playground.

Germany is like us in that there is such a thing as the 'democratic centre'. They are combining - ignore the window dressing - to ensure the isolation of extremes as long as they can.

The last UK GE was run by a simple silent slogan 'anyone but the Tory'. Farage's danger is that elections now have the silent slogan 'Anyone bur Reform.

I'd like you to be right, but I'm not sure you are. I do a fair amount of canvassing, as I've done for most of the last 50 years. I don't remember a time with more voters adrift. They aren't generally very hostile, contrary to some assumptions, they just have no idea who to choose to represent them. A fair number of those will give Reform a shot, simply because they've not tried them before. There are some "Anyone but Reform" voters, but a minority.

Its far worse than lets give Reform a shot. Hate them or hate them, Reform are carefully crafting a narrative which touches on the concerns of disconnected voters and offers simple and clear solutions. OK, in the real world they are neither simple nor solutions, but the voters in question don't know that.

Yes. Reform despite all that face a choice. The tradition of not voting for the authoritarian right, or left, is quite strong. Farage's semi-admission into the playground rests on his disavowal of NF/BNP/EDL etc, and only using dog whistle tactics - which of course Tories have done in the past too.

Both Reform voters and Reform possibles are split. Many are of course populist 'strong man' extremists glad to have a party to support. But many are not. They are ordinary UK punters who belive (wrongly) that complex problems have simple solutions, fed up with mainstream politics just as millions of Americans were fed up with Democrats.

In the British system the "strong man" isn't needed. Elect a majority government and they can largely do as they see fit. Reform's pitch could be as simple as:

We need significant reforms of health, education, social services and tax
We need to get value for money - so much of your money is being wasted by bureaucracy and silly agendas like equality officers
We need to make work pay, and that means cutting the cost of living
We need to restore pride in our communities, our country and in ourselves
We need to stop our town and cities falling into disrepair by fixing the pavements and roads and reopening the shops
Elect a Reform government and we'll cut the waste and the fraud which We All Know is there, and make our country fit for purpose again.

None of these are remotely easy. Many are contradictory. But there is enough truth in each point to sound compelling, especially if it can tie in with the massive fraud and waste which these voters believe is there to cut.

"Are you thinking what we're thinking?" asked Michael Howard, to be answered with "oh hell no" by the electorate. But reverse it - "We're thinking what YOU'RE thinking" and Reform can absolutely smash it.

The key to it? Labour's pledge card. 5 things we'd do. Simplistic but ambitious. Easy to attack but hard to disprove. On continuous repeat until they become ingrained. Once the pledges become the truth, its practically impossible to disarm them with facts.

Very very few people can ever pull this off. Blair did. Farage can.

Eek. Please @RochdalePioneers don't make posts like this. I'm struggling to think of a better post for Reform to use to campaign on. It is excellent and horrendously disturbing at the same time.

Did you call?