As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
My wife knows the songs very well as she played Sarah Brown in a local production a few years back.
Wahay ... that makes you Marlon Brando (in a sense).
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
Tobacco (smells disgusting, minimal high, kills you) and coke (turns you into an arsehole, supply chain run by the worst people in the world) have to be two of the worst narcotics, I would give them both a wide berth. I'm planning on becoming a proper raver in my retirement.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
What I noticed was that hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks. Then when Germany got itself into a mess over sending them and were rightly being criticised for it you were one of the posters who was posting several times a day very passionately about how terrible it was. After a few days when Germany agreed to send tanks (as I predicted on the very same day that the US announced that it would some day send tanks, you claimed that this was just an "excuse" despite all the obvious evidence that that was consistent German policy) you didn't post any more. How many countries have actually sent Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine 3 months later? and how many? and what difference have they made so far? Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?
1) "posting several times a day".
I think there was precisely *one* conversation about it. Admittedly it got rather heated, but I fear you are gilding the lily a little.
2) "hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks"
You may not have noticed it, but people were.
3) "that was consistent German policy"
If what happened was 'consistent German policy", then I'm surprised anything ever gets done in Germany. It was an almighty mess, played out in public.
4) " Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?"
AIUI, yes - at least Leo, Leo2 and derivatives.
But as I've said, both here and in the past, Germany's done very well since. Once they decided to do it, they've done it well. But like all of this (and this is the case for all allied countries); it's later than it could have been.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Yes, but perhaps while his last years were not so good, it is possible that had he not taken those steps his last decade might have been significantly worse?
It is always possible but we won't know that. Physically quite possibly, mentally however probably not. I can think of few things worse than losing your mind. I could cope with physical infirmity etc but I never want to go down the dementia route
My condolences. My father went down a similar route. It is very distressing.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
What I noticed was that hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks. Then when Germany got itself into a mess over sending them and were rightly being criticised for it you were one of the posters who was posting several times a day very passionately about how terrible it was. After a few days when Germany agreed to send tanks (as I predicted on the very same day that the US announced that it would some day send tanks, you claimed that this was just an "excuse" despite all the obvious evidence that that was consistent German policy) you didn't post any more. How many countries have actually sent Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine 3 months later? and how many? and what difference have they made so far? Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?
Germany was disallowing other countries to export their Leopard tanks to Ukraine, under the usual provisions in arms sales controlling re-export.
The Ukrainians appear to be building up forces for an offensive - presumably for when the mud is finally gone/diminished to a reasonable level.
There was some video online of a test of British AS-90 in the current conditions.
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
There is a simple solution to Save America: Arm Absolutely Everyone. If every citizen over the age of 5 was forced to carry a gun at all times, nobody would every be shot.
I think it's more likely that the 2 million surviving Americans would eventually decide that allowing everyone to have a gun was a frankly stupid idea.
Sadly until that occurs America will continue to treat guns insanely.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Point is there's not a great deal of difference between healthy and obese. Note the obese are also more likely to be unfit to work, which is an additional cost to government.
Smokers are good value for governments - assuming they are able to work.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
Not entirely true. Going private normally means using facilities that are not available o the NHS (though sometimes are outsourced). Where you are partially correct is that the medical staff are often NHS consultants who have a unique employment status enabling them to work in both sectors, while simultaneously claiming they are underpaid and over worked.
Proper privatisation of the NHS (if carried out effectively) would sort out the problems. Sadly it won't happen because there is not the political will to take on the vested interests. Blair should have done it, but he missed his chance
How do you ensure good treatment for hard-up people if healthcare is run as a private sector business?
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
There is a simple solution to Save America: Arm Absolutely Everyone. If every citizen over the age of 5 was forced to carry a gun at all times, nobody would every be shot.
I think it's more likely that the 2 million surviving Americans would eventually decide that allowing everyone to have a gun was a frankly stupid idea.
Sadly until that occurs America will continue to treat guns insanely.
You think they will get the point that quickly?
That seems optimistic.
99.33% population lose - I would hope so but yes I'm probably overly optimistic.
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
My wife knows the songs very well as she played Sarah Brown in a local production a few years back.
Wahay ... that makes you Marlon Brando (in a sense).
Sadly not as I played Arvide Abernethy in the same show...
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
Yes, in the old days us lefties used to call going private by its proper name: "queue jumping".
You much prefer most should have a shitty lowest denominator service, while touching the forelock to the doctors that enable the system and enrich themselves on it.
No. I'd much prefer that everybody had equal access to the highest quality health service imaginable.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Did you offset by the savings costs on pensions though?
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
The difficulty is this. Private enterprise is pretty good at building new supply to meet demand better. The trouble with healthcare is that the limiting factor is often staff, and substantial extra supply of them can only really happen slowly and expensively. Which are not words that private enterprise likes.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Isn’t there another factor here? Smokers (to give one example) monopolising a particular strand of treatment such as lung cancer. I can see an argument which says that they are unfairly drawing resources away from the person whose lung cancer was just bad luck.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Covid is ongoing. My mother has just had it
I think it's still officially a pandemic according the WHO? Maybe should be reclassified as endemic. In the latest wave that peaked a few weeks ago around here, there was the highest number of patients in my wife's hospital because of covid since the start of the pandemic, though fewer ending up in intensive care.
The virus is still pandemic, depending on how you define the term - but as a crisis, it's over.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Which would be great except the definition of obesity is based on BMI.
And BMI was invented in 1832 based on the ideas of a Belgian Astronomer who was trying to identify the average Belgian man in the 1830s...
It's a flawed method we use because everyone uses it.
In the same way that Covid initially wasn't an airborne diseases because the 1950's study on airborne diseases everyone used was taken as gospel
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Isn’t there another factor here? Smokers (to give one example) monopolising a particular strand of treatment such as lung cancer. I can see an argument which says that they are unfairly drawing resources away from the person whose lung cancer was just bad luck.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
Given that smokers pay a lot more tax on their sin than the NHS spends on treating it I don't see how they can be a net drain
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
What I noticed was that hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks. Then when Germany got itself into a mess over sending them and were rightly being criticised for it you were one of the posters who was posting several times a day very passionately about how terrible it was. After a few days when Germany agreed to send tanks (as I predicted on the very same day that the US announced that it would some day send tanks, you claimed that this was just an "excuse" despite all the obvious evidence that that was consistent German policy) you didn't post any more. How many countries have actually sent Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine 3 months later? and how many? and what difference have they made so far? Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?
1) "posting several times a day".
I think there was precisely *one* conversation about it. Admittedly it got rather heated, but I fear you are gilding the lily a little.
2) "hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks"
You may not have noticed it, but people were.
3) "that was consistent German policy"
If what happened was 'consistent German policy", then I'm surprised anything ever gets done in Germany. It was an almighty mess, played out in public.
4) " Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?"
AIUI, yes - at least Leo, Leo2 and derivatives.
But as I've said, both here and in the past, Germany's done very well since. Once they decided to do it, they've done it well. But like all of this (and this is the case for all allied countries); it's later than it could have been.
1) Your memory is failing you.
2) So not enough to notice.
3) Consistent German policy means that they said they wouldn't give new types of weapons systems to Ukraine if the US didn't, and that is what had happened in previous examples. I know I have explained this to you before but you are very stubborn, and prefer to just stick to whatever evidence-free opinion you first come to.
4) So I assume you can show that every European country with Leopard tanks immediately took steps to begin shipping them to Ukraine after the German decision of 25th January? Because that is not the impression I have.
I'm sure you can explain to yourself why you were so heated then, but couldn't be bothered to make a single criticism afterwards of all the delays by other countries. But you are just kidding yourself.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
The difficulty is this. Private enterprise is pretty good at building new supply to meet demand better. The trouble with healthcare is that the limiting factor is often staff, and substantial extra supply of them can only really happen slowly and expensively. Which are not words that private enterprise likes.
Also, the fact remains that if it all goes wrong you’re ending up in an NHS hospital for trauma/urgent care. The public sector will always have to subsidise that side of the equation, which ends up flattering the apparent costs in the private sector as they don’t have to run an A&E.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Which would be great except the definition of obesity is based on BMI.
And BMI was invented in 1832 based on the ideas of a Belgian Astronomer who was trying to identify the average Belgian man in the 1830s...
It's a flawed method we use because everyone uses it.
In the same way that Covid initially wasn't an airborne diseases because the 1950's study on airborne diseases everyone used was taken as gospel
Tell that to the person who was suggesting that the obese be sent to the back of the queue and yes BMI is largely unuseful
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Isn’t there another factor here? Smokers (to give one example) monopolising a particular strand of treatment such as lung cancer. I can see an argument which says that they are unfairly drawing resources away from the person whose lung cancer was just bad luck.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
Given that smokers pay a lot more tax on their sin than the NHS spends on treating it I don't see how they can be a net drain
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
Yes, in the old days us lefties used to call going private by its proper name: "queue jumping".
You much prefer most should have a shitty lowest denominator service, while touching the forelock to the doctors that enable the system and enrich themselves on it.
No. I'd much prefer that everybody had equal access to the highest quality health service imaginable.
There comes a time when it is simply impossible without major reforms and an acceptance it is not sustainable without reforms
As I mentioned earlier it needs a Good Friday Agreement will from across the political divide to come up with acceptable solutions and make difficult decisions.
Unfortunately I do not see the politicians looking at the greater good in this way as each plays it as a political football and it continues to fail
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) for COVID-19 is expected to be dissolved next month, along with the reclassification of the disease from a category 5 to a category 4 notifiable communicable disease, Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Jui-yuan (薛瑞元) said yesterday.
As Japan has announced that it would lift all remaining COVID-19 border measures on May 8 and US President Joe Biden has said he would end the nation’s COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has lately often been asked when the CECC would be disbanded...
They did pretty well, with under 19k deaths for a population of 23.5m, compared to our 200k plus.
Proper border control and much lower obesity.
Proper contingency planning, and rapid response were also necessary to their success. It's a good lesson to learn in case of future, more serious pandemics.
The risks of them might be relatively small, but as we've seen, the costs can be enormous.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Isn’t there another factor here? Smokers (to give one example) monopolising a particular strand of treatment such as lung cancer. I can see an argument which says that they are unfairly drawing resources away from the person whose lung cancer was just bad luck.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
Given that smokers pay a lot more tax on their sin than the NHS spends on treating it I don't see how they can be a net drain
Resource in the sense broader than money. There are only so many scanners/surgeons, so non-smokers probably die on the waiting list because smokers fill the queue.
Again, I don’t agree with this line of logic because I am all in for “socialised” centrally run medicine, but I can see the argument.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Isn’t there another factor here? Smokers (to give one example) monopolising a particular strand of treatment such as lung cancer. I can see an argument which says that they are unfairly drawing resources away from the person whose lung cancer was just bad luck.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
Given that smokers pay a lot more tax on their sin than the NHS spends on treating it I don't see how they can be a net drain
Fag breaks?
We have government funded fag breaks? News to me they are paid for out of taxation.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Yeah, I think any idea of sinners to the back of the queue is ridiculous. If we do that then we also make climbers and mountain bikers wait longer in A&E for broken arms etc, do we?
I do support the best use of a resource argument - i.e. you don't give the liver to the person who is still likely to abuse alcohol if there's someone else in need who is not.
The personal budget idea has no benefits to me over full privatisation with health insurance with some minimum service for the poor (and I don't support that, either).
The face is that healthcare use is largely a lottery. You can make 'bad' decisions and drop dead from a heart attack without a day's hospital care in your life or you can be a picture of virtue and spend decades with MS (ok, MS probably covered under your exemptions, but lets say some unknown genetic disposition to poorer joints - my FiL, who was keen sportsman up to his forties, has had three hip replacements and a knee replacement with another one coming, so I suspect he'd be out of budget by now).
Where I think the linked studies are important is in exposing the fallacy that cutting obesity/smoking necessarily saves money. It does however, on average, give people more years of healthy life. But quite possibly a worse or at least longer final few years in poor health, which is something we have to grapple with.
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
My wife knows the songs very well as she played Sarah Brown in a local production a few years back.
Wahay ... that makes you Marlon Brando (in a sense).
Sadly not as I played Arvide Abernethy in the same show...
Ah ok.
"A reasoned old man with a warm heart that harbors only the kindest intentions, even if he tends to be a little gullible."
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Yeah, I think any idea of sinners to the back of the queue is ridiculous. If we do that then we also make climbers and mountain bikers wait longer in A&E for broken arms etc, do we?
I do support the best use of a resource argument - i.e. you don't give the liver to the person who is still likely to abuse alcohol if there's someone else in need who is not.
The personal budget idea has no benefits to me over full privatisation with health insurance with some minimum service for the poor (and I don't support that, either).
The face is that healthcare use is largely a lottery. You can make 'bad' decisions and drop dead from a heart attack without a day's hospital care in your life or you can be a picture of virtue and spend decades with MS (ok, MS probably covered under your exemptions, but lets say some unknown genetic disposition to poorer joints - my FiL, who was keen sportsman up to his forties, has had three hip replacements and a knee replacement with another one coming, so I suspect he'd be out of budget by now).
Where I think the linked studies are important is in exposing the fallacy that cutting obesity/smoking necessarily saves money. It does however, on average, give people more years of healthy life. But quite possibly a worse or at least longer final few years in poor health, which is something we have to grapple with.
My suggestion for lifetime healthcare budget I suggest that it be set at the average lifetime healthcare cost so you would only be in a few cases paying huge amounts extra and that could be made up with insurance taken out when young at a minimal cost per year I suspect. Just pass legislation that when taken on for such insurance the premium can only then rise by cpi and they cannot rescind the insurance.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Yes, but perhaps while his last years were not so good, it is possible that had he not taken those steps his last decade might have been significantly worse?
It is always possible but we won't know that. Physically quite possibly, mentally however probably not. I can think of few things worse than losing your mind. I could cope with physical infirmity etc but I never want to go down the dementia route
My mum (who, health wise, was pretty much a paragon of virtue) is in a similar position, so I have plenty of sympathy with this view. Our neighbour's father died suddenly of a heart attack at a similar age to my mum's age now, having been in good health (apparently) right up to that point. I would choose to be him, rather than my mum.
Two anecdotal examples though. They have to be weighed up against the smokers/obese etc who die in their forties and never get to see their children grow up.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Which would be great except the definition of obesity is based on BMI.
And BMI was invented in 1832 based on the ideas of a Belgian Astronomer who was trying to identify the average Belgian man in the 1830s...
It's a flawed method we use because everyone uses it.
In the same way that Covid initially wasn't an airborne diseases because the 1950's study on airborne diseases everyone used was taken as gospel
BMI is certainly not optimal but is flawed a balanced adjective to describe it? Not an expert but would think it gets over 90% of the population in the right risk categories?
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Point is there's not a great deal of difference between healthy and obese. Note the obese are also more likely to be unfit to work, which is an additional cost to government.
Smokers are good value for governments - assuming they are able to work.
£21 for a packet at Charing Cross WH Smiths. Highest I've yet come across. You have to be nuts.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Yes, but perhaps while his last years were not so good, it is possible that had he not taken those steps his last decade might have been significantly worse?
It is always possible but we won't know that. Physically quite possibly, mentally however probably not. I can think of few things worse than losing your mind. I could cope with physical infirmity etc but I never want to go down the dementia route
My mum (who, health wise, was pretty much a paragon of virtue) is in a similar position, so I have plenty of sympathy with this view. Our neighbour's father died suddenly of a heart attack at a similar age to my mum's age now, having been in good health (apparently) right up to that point. I would choose to be him, rather than my mum.
Two anecdotal examples though. They have to be weighed up against the smokers/obese etc who die in their forties and never get to see their children grow up.
Yes but plenty that do no wrong and live healthy lives also die young, Rik Mayall for a famous one died aged 54 after returning from a jog. My cousin for another never smoked,drank,did drugs, vegetarian and a healthy living exemplar.....dropped dead walking down the road with his wife and kids due to a cerebral haemorage. Life is a lottery you can only skew the odds one way or the other so far.
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Also still a virus to be feared if you're frail.
That's the problem. Most people probably give it very little thought now, but for some people with particular vulnerabilities it's still having a major effect on their lives.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Yeah, I think any idea of sinners to the back of the queue is ridiculous. If we do that then we also make climbers and mountain bikers wait longer in A&E for broken arms etc, do we?
I do support the best use of a resource argument - i.e. you don't give the liver to the person who is still likely to abuse alcohol if there's someone else in need who is not.
The personal budget idea has no benefits to me over full privatisation with health insurance with some minimum service for the poor (and I don't support that, either).
The face is that healthcare use is largely a lottery. You can make 'bad' decisions and drop dead from a heart attack without a day's hospital care in your life or you can be a picture of virtue and spend decades with MS (ok, MS probably covered under your exemptions, but lets say some unknown genetic disposition to poorer joints - my FiL, who was keen sportsman up to his forties, has had three hip replacements and a knee replacement with another one coming, so I suspect he'd be out of budget by now).
Where I think the linked studies are important is in exposing the fallacy that cutting obesity/smoking necessarily saves money. It does however, on average, give people more years of healthy life. But quite possibly a worse or at least longer final few years in poor health, which is something we have to grapple with.
My suggestion for lifetime healthcare budget I suggest that it be set at the average lifetime healthcare cost so you would only be in a few cases paying huge amounts extra and that could be made up with insurance taken out when young at a minimal cost per year I suspect. Just pass legislation that when taken on for such insurance the premium can only then rise by cpi and they cannot rescind the insurance.
Or raise tax to cover that same cost at a similar effective premium? If it's a small cost, then why not? If it's a big cost then your insurance premium suddenly looks pretty scary for all but the wealthiest.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
The tank deliveries have already started - quite a few are already in Ukraine. Perhaps that is the reason.
Maybe. I think the delays in deciding to send any, the small numbers being offered, the delays in actually sending any, are all pretty disappointing.
There's also definitely a bit of a strange double standard with some posters where any German delays are evil and any reasons given are just excuses, but delays by anyone else are understandable and reasons given are reasonable.
I think it was more that there was a political debate in Germany which genuinely delayed arms supplies for a time, not only from Germany itself, but also from countries which require German permission to send various bits of kit to Ukraine.
But you make some fair points about double standards.
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
My wife knows the songs very well as she played Sarah Brown in a local production a few years back.
Wahay ... that makes you Marlon Brando (in a sense).
Sadly not as I played Arvide Abernethy in the same show...
Ah ok.
"A reasoned old man with a warm heart that harbors only the kindest intentions, even if he tends to be a little gullible."
Definitely not Brando but a nice role.
Yes I don't think I could carry off the Sky Masterson role. Still, I had a song!
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Yes, but perhaps while his last years were not so good, it is possible that had he not taken those steps his last decade might have been significantly worse?
It is always possible but we won't know that. Physically quite possibly, mentally however probably not. I can think of few things worse than losing your mind. I could cope with physical infirmity etc but I never want to go down the dementia route
My mum (who, health wise, was pretty much a paragon of virtue) is in a similar position, so I have plenty of sympathy with this view. Our neighbour's father died suddenly of a heart attack at a similar age to my mum's age now, having been in good health (apparently) right up to that point. I would choose to be him, rather than my mum.
Two anecdotal examples though. They have to be weighed up against the smokers/obese etc who die in their forties and never get to see their children grow up.
Yes but plenty that do no wrong and live healthy lives also die young, Rik Mayall for a famous one died aged 54 after returning from a jog. My cousin for another never smoked,drank,did drugs, vegetarian and a healthy living exemplar.....dropped dead walking down the road with his wife and kids due to a cerebral haemorage. Life is a lottery you can only skew the odds one way or the other so far.
Indeed. But the odds do get skewed, there's plenty of evidence on that.
(I'm not aware, FWIW, of much on last years of life - as opposed to lifespan or health years of life - related to lifestyle choices; that would be very interesting)
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Sure. But there may be extra years of work, compared to the less well. Or extra years of productivity through voluntary work etc. Possibly higher lifetime earnings (and taxes - although the sin taxes for e.g. smoking offset that) given the correlations between social class and health (you can argue the direction of causation).
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
The initial response was to the idea of sending the obese etc to the back of the queue....we often see it being touted that the sinners cost the nhs more money I was merely refuting that which I think was achieved.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
Yeah, I think any idea of sinners to the back of the queue is ridiculous. If we do that then we also make climbers and mountain bikers wait longer in A&E for broken arms etc, do we?
I do support the best use of a resource argument - i.e. you don't give the liver to the person who is still likely to abuse alcohol if there's someone else in need who is not.
The personal budget idea has no benefits to me over full privatisation with health insurance with some minimum service for the poor (and I don't support that, either).
The face is that healthcare use is largely a lottery. You can make 'bad' decisions and drop dead from a heart attack without a day's hospital care in your life or you can be a picture of virtue and spend decades with MS (ok, MS probably covered under your exemptions, but lets say some unknown genetic disposition to poorer joints - my FiL, who was keen sportsman up to his forties, has had three hip replacements and a knee replacement with another one coming, so I suspect he'd be out of budget by now).
Where I think the linked studies are important is in exposing the fallacy that cutting obesity/smoking necessarily saves money. It does however, on average, give people more years of healthy life. But quite possibly a worse or at least longer final few years in poor health, which is something we have to grapple with.
My suggestion for lifetime healthcare budget I suggest that it be set at the average lifetime healthcare cost so you would only be in a few cases paying huge amounts extra and that could be made up with insurance taken out when young at a minimal cost per year I suspect. Just pass legislation that when taken on for such insurance the premium can only then rise by cpi and they cannot rescind the insurance.
Or raise tax to cover that same cost at a similar effective premium? If it's a small cost, then why not? If it's a big cost then your insurance premium suddenly looks pretty scary for all but the wealthiest.
One good reason not to go down the raise tax to cover it route? If you go the insurance route the NHS doesn't get the money unless they actually treat you. If they get the money regardless as we have seen 1£ added to the nhs budget doesn't seem to buy us an additional 1£ of healthcare.
The NHS has more people working for it than ever before, it has more money than ever before....yet we are getting less healthcare than ever before. This is to mind a general malaise of the public sector we give them a pound they give us 50p worth of services
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
Higher annual costs in the same year, if they are contemporaries. But the smokers die earlier, and the costs for the then healthy continue to rise. I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Isn’t there another factor here? Smokers (to give one example) monopolising a particular strand of treatment such as lung cancer. I can see an argument which says that they are unfairly drawing resources away from the person whose lung cancer was just bad luck.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
There's something in that, but it's dwarfed by the tax revenue from smokers.
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Also still a virus to be feared if you're frail.
That's the problem. Most people probably give it very little thought now, but for some people with particular vulnerabilities it's still having a major effect on their lives.
Also Long Covid. The variety of symptoms and their persistence puts this virus in a different basket to flu.
Not fretting about it but not blase would be about where I am.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
It's because it's entirely dependent on the US. I think it's a serious mistake by the Biden administration not to have supplied them. The stuff about training is just quibbling; there's been plenty of time, and it's just served as an excuse for delaying the decision.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
Yes of course. German excuses bad, American excuses good.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The counter offensive has started, so we might be getting up your nose all over again.
Of course it's not. One of the leaked documents was very crudely doctored. Pro-Russian trolls swapped the Russian and Ukrainian death tolls and then pasted in a smaller number over the newly faked Russian death toll to boot. It was pretty obvious tampering, so Carlson and Fox don't realistically believe it; it's just useful for them to push their narrative.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
Yes of course. German excuses bad, American excuses good.
Or…. horses for courses.
Plus I never criticised the Germans in the first place. Not just allowing, but enabling, the movement of large numbers of its MBT into a war zone with the express intent of killing Russians was a massive shift for the Germans and I quite understand why they felt more comfortable once we and the yanks joined it.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
It's because it's entirely dependent on the US. I think it's a serious mistake by the Biden administration not to have supplied them. The stuff about training is just quibbling; there's been plenty of time, and it's just served as an excuse for delaying the decision.
I think it is reasonable to have said so far “come off it, we can’t train and equip you in a modern NATO aircraft fast enough to make a a difference, so let’s focus on other stuff instead” but I do also agree that, having pushed everything else just about as far as we can, we might as well start that now and even if it doesn’t help win the war, it might help secure the peace after Ukraine has thrown the Russians out anyway.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
It's because it's entirely dependent on the US. I think it's a serious mistake by the Biden administration not to have supplied them. The stuff about training is just quibbling; there's been plenty of time, and it's just served as an excuse for delaying the decision.
I think it is reasonable to have said so far “come off it, we can’t train and equip you in a modern NATO aircraft fast enough to make a a difference, so let’s focus on other stuff instead” but I do also agree that, having pushed everything else just about as far as we can, we might as well start that now and even if it doesn’t help win the war, it might help secure the peace after Ukraine has thrown the Russians out anyway.
If they win the West will also have another new long term market.
Of course it's not. One of the leaked documents was very crudely doctored. Pro-Russian trolls swapped the Russian and Ukrainian death tolls and then pasted in a smaller number over the newly faked Russian death toll to boot. It was pretty obvious tampering, so Carlson and Fox don't realistically believe it; it's just useful for them to push their narrative.
For a start, it doesn’t pass the sniff test, even without knowing any real details. Given 100,000 Russian casualties (seems to be the most quoted number) that would imply three quarters of a million Ukrainians on this ratio. That’s obvious rubbish.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
Of course it's not. One of the leaked documents was very crudely doctored. Pro-Russian trolls swapped the Russian and Ukrainian death tolls and then pasted in a smaller number over the newly faked Russian death toll to boot. It was pretty obvious tampering, so Carlson and Fox don't realistically believe it; it's just useful for them to push their narrative.
For a start, it doesn’t pass the sniff test, even without knowing any real details. Given 100,000 Russian casualties (seems to be the most quoted number) that would imply three quarters of a million Ukrainians on this ratio. That’s obvious rubbish.
This would be "news" from Fox News? From the company that just had to pay out 3/4 billion dollars for being lying liars who lie?
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
It's because it's entirely dependent on the US. I think it's a serious mistake by the Biden administration not to have supplied them. The stuff about training is just quibbling; there's been plenty of time, and it's just served as an excuse for delaying the decision.
I think it is reasonable to have said so far “come off it, we can’t train and equip you in a modern NATO aircraft fast enough to make a a difference, so let’s focus on other stuff instead” but I do also agree that, having pushed everything else just about as far as we can, we might as well start that now and even if it doesn’t help win the war, it might help secure the peace after Ukraine has thrown the Russians out anyway.
Point is they've been saying that for a year. They could have done the training long before any decision.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
Sounds like you were stitched up.
Sorry.
A brief hiatus from posting from you might not go amiss after that comment.
Of course it's not. One of the leaked documents was very crudely doctored. Pro-Russian trolls swapped the Russian and Ukrainian death tolls and then pasted in a smaller number over the newly faked Russian death toll to boot. It was pretty obvious tampering, so Carlson and Fox don't realistically believe it; it's just useful for them to push their narrative.
For a start, it doesn’t pass the sniff test, even without knowing any real details. Given 100,000 Russian casualties (seems to be the most quoted number) that would imply three quarters of a million Ukrainians on this ratio. That’s obvious rubbish.
This would be "news" from Fox News? From the company that just had to pay out 3/4 billion dollars for being lying liars who lie?
More specifically, from Tucker, who did more than any of their employees to provide Dominion with the evidence to make its case.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
Sounds like you were stitched up.
Sorry.
A brief hiatus from posting from you might not go amiss after that comment.
It was funny
It should also be noted that I had a private diagnosis and the same surgeon operated on me on the Wales NHS nearly 3 years later
Joking apart - the key point in Mordaunt's statement is that if the SNP do not have audited accounts by 31 May they will receive no further Short Money after April's payment:
Ooft 🔥 "On the upside though I guess It will be easier for them to have a whip-round amongst their membership as that number is dwindling to a point where most of them could fit into a Luxury Campervan! 😂🤣
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The NHS in Wales is generally appalling. 20+ years of Labour government with little or no reform just to be seen as doing things different.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The problem is that there is no alternative for season ticket users.
AFAIK the plan for such tickets is to treat a payment card/device as a token associated with a season ticket, and then the billing system will apply appropriate rules for the taken journey.
Eventually we should be able to swipe some sort of contactless thingy near a reader and get a full range of tickets and discounts automatically applied.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The NHS in Wales is generally appalling. 20+ years of Labour government with little or no reform just to be seen as doing things different.
Joking apart - the key point in Mordaunt's statement is that if the SNP do not have audited accounts by 31 May they will receive no further Short Money after April's payment:
Ooft 🔥 "On the upside though I guess It will be easier for them to have a whip-round amongst their membership as that number is dwindling to a point where most of them could fit into a Luxury Campervan! 😂🤣
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The NHS in Wales is generally appalling. 20+ years of Labour government with little or no reform just to be seen as doing things different.
"The Welsh government's health minister, Eluned Morgan, has refused calls from opposition parties to resign following the announcement, vowing to continue to "serve the people of Wales to the best of [her] ability"."
How do you drill it into the inadequate that the best of her ability is woefully short of what is required?
The problem is that there is no alternative for season ticket users.
AFAIK the plan for such tickets is to treat a payment card/device as a token associated with a season ticket, and then the billing system will apply appropriate rules for the taken journey.
Eventually we should be able to swipe some sort of contactless thingy near a reader and get a full range of tickets and discounts automatically applied.
They've been saying that for years.
But haven't got to the stage of recognising that a payment card is actually the same card, if used directly or via an electronic wallet on a smartphone.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The NHS in Wales is generally appalling. 20+ years of Labour government with little or no reform just to be seen as doing things different.
It's sad that lack of genuine scrutiny Cardiff Bay gets, they need a kick up the backside to drive them from complanancy. We need a Welsh version of the SNP camper van to get people interested in the corruption and mismanagement from the Assembly.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
The NHS in Wales is generally appalling. 20+ years of Labour government with little or no reform just to be seen as doing things different.
"The Welsh government's health minister, Eluned Morgan, has refused calls from opposition parties to resign following the announcement, vowing to continue to "serve the people of Wales to the best of [her] ability"."
How do you drill it into the inadequate that the best of her ability is woefully short of what is required?
A problem most of us have been having for many years with many at the DfE.
The problem is that there is no alternative for season ticket users.
AFAIK the plan for such tickets is to treat a payment card/device as a token associated with a season ticket, and then the billing system will apply appropriate rules for the taken journey.
Eventually we should be able to swipe some sort of contactless thingy near a reader and get a full range of tickets and discounts automatically applied.
They've been saying that for years.
But haven't got to the stage of recognising that a payment card is actually the same card, if used directly or via an electronic wallet on a smartphone.
Which is hardly surprising given that the card on your phone / watch isn't the same card (it will have slightly different details) to the card in your hand.
30 seconds on reading Apple's specs or 2 seconds of using it would tell them that.
1. Raab won't resign 2. Sunak won't fire Raaab 3. Incredulity from opposition / hacks batted away by Lee Anderson 4. Senior Civil Servants start to resign in alarming numbers, telling stories about the brute Raaaab 5. Sunak fires Raaaaaab. Tries to claim credit for doing so. 6. Incredulity from opposition / hacks batted away by Lee Anderson
Joking apart - the key point in Mordaunt's statement is that if the SNP do not have audited accounts by 31 May they will receive no further Short Money after April's payment:
Ooft 🔥 "On the upside though I guess It will be easier for them to have a whip-round amongst their membership as that number is dwindling to a point where most of them could fit into a Luxury Campervan! 😂🤣
I expect they will have a £600,000 fundraiser to replace the Short Money. I won’t be contributing, although I know some SNP members who probably would! The ones that think the spotlight on the SNP is unfair media attention!
The problem is that there is no alternative for season ticket users.
AFAIK the plan for such tickets is to treat a payment card/device as a token associated with a season ticket, and then the billing system will apply appropriate rules for the taken journey.
Eventually we should be able to swipe some sort of contactless thingy near a reader and get a full range of tickets and discounts automatically applied.
They've been saying that for years.
But haven't got to the stage of recognising that a payment card is actually the same card, if used directly or via an electronic wallet on a smartphone.
Which is hardly surprising given that the card on your phone / watch isn't the same card (it will have slightly different details) to the card in your hand.
30 seconds on reading Apple's specs or 2 seconds of using it would tell them that.
Yes. This is actually a feature of how the card payments system works. It is also trivial to link the "instances" together, though.
1. Raab won't resign 2. Sunak won't fire Raaab 3. Incredulity from opposition / hacks batted away by Lee Anderson 4. Senior Civil Servants start to resign in alarming numbers, telling stories about the brute Raaaab 5. Sunak fires Raaaaaab. Tries to claim credit for doing so. 6. Incredulity from opposition / hacks batted away by Lee Anderson
It depends on the report which will be made public
Mrs. F was just reading me a Facebook post from someone who had moved to Hodnet, Shropshire, calling it the poshest village in Britain. Is it? (Cues PB discussion.)
Joking apart - the key point in Mordaunt's statement is that if the SNP do not have audited accounts by 31 May they will receive no further Short Money after April's payment:
Ooft 🔥 "On the upside though I guess It will be easier for them to have a whip-round amongst their membership as that number is dwindling to a point where most of them could fit into a Luxury Campervan! 😂🤣
I expect they will have a £600,000 fundraiser to replace the Short Money. I won’t be contributing, although I know some SNP members who probably would! The ones that think the spotlight on the SNP is unfair media attention!
I will also donate to the SNP.
They have kept me royally entertained these past few weeks, better than a ticket to Jongleurs.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
The tank deliveries have already started - quite a few are already in Ukraine. Perhaps that is the reason.
Maybe. I think the delays in deciding to send any, the small numbers being offered, the delays in actually sending any, are all pretty disappointing.
There's also definitely a bit of a strange double standard with some posters where any German delays are evil and any reasons given are just excuses, but delays by anyone else are understandable and reasons given are reasonable.
I think it was more that there was a political debate in Germany which genuinely delayed arms supplies for a time, not only from Germany itself, but also from countries which require German permission to send various bits of kit to Ukraine.
But you make some fair points about double standards.
There certainly was debate in Germany. But to me it looks like it is basically the US deciding what kind of kit Ukraine gets, and there was obviously a much longer debate in the US about whether Ukraine should get tanks or not (the German position always being "we won't do it without our allies"). My assumption (based on nothing) is that at some point the US decided that Ukraine should get tanks but for some reason didn't want to commit their own tanks, so gave the UK the go-ahead to promise Challengers hoping that that would unlock Leopards. When the Germans insisted on not moving without the US, they fairly quickly (I think 11 days between the British Challenger announcement and the US/German Abrams/Leopard announcement) gave in and promised to deliver Abrams at some point in the future.
There are plenty of people in Germany who think Scholz did well to stick to his guns, as it were, for those 11 days and keep the US committed and Germany in lockstep with the US. And maybe they've got a point, although there are still questions about how far the US will continue, and what the US aims are here, how the US sees the war ending.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
Yes of course. German excuses bad, American excuses good.
Or…. horses for courses.
Plus I never criticised the Germans in the first place. Not just allowing, but enabling, the movement of large numbers of its MBT into a war zone with the express intent of killing Russians was a massive shift for the Germans and I quite understand why they felt more comfortable once we and the yanks joined it.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Partisan advantage? No, the best thing for the country is obviously the election of a Whig/Liberal/Conservative/Labour* government and the reform merely allows that to happen more easily.
*Delete as appropriate
It is why we need some kind of constitutional convention that is based on evidence and taking from the best systems from around the world. Unfortunately the vested interests would attempt to subvert this too.
I think a good place to start would be to teach all youngsters about government and politics (GCSE mandatory perhaps) so they can see how the system works and how it could be made better. They will then have a better idea about political parties and vested interests.
That was supposed to happen just after I finished GCSEs, 20 years ago. I guess it never took place.
Sunak must be hoping that the Raab report is clear cut. If the conclusions are a bit wooly, and he has to make a decision, then the pressure is on him.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
What I noticed was that hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks. Then when Germany got itself into a mess over sending them and were rightly being criticised for it you were one of the posters who was posting several times a day very passionately about how terrible it was. After a few days when Germany agreed to send tanks (as I predicted on the very same day that the US announced that it would some day send tanks, you claimed that this was just an "excuse" despite all the obvious evidence that that was consistent German policy) you didn't post any more. How many countries have actually sent Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine 3 months later? and how many? and what difference have they made so far? Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?
1) "posting several times a day".
I think there was precisely *one* conversation about it. Admittedly it got rather heated, but I fear you are gilding the lily a little.
2) "hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks"
You may not have noticed it, but people were.
3) "that was consistent German policy"
If what happened was 'consistent German policy", then I'm surprised anything ever gets done in Germany. It was an almighty mess, played out in public.
4) " Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?"
AIUI, yes - at least Leo, Leo2 and derivatives.
But as I've said, both here and in the past, Germany's done very well since. Once they decided to do it, they've done it well. But like all of this (and this is the case for all allied countries); it's later than it could have been.
1) Your memory is failing you.
2) So not enough to notice.
3) Consistent German policy means that they said they wouldn't give new types of weapons systems to Ukraine if the US didn't, and that is what had happened in previous examples. I know I have explained this to you before but you are very stubborn, and prefer to just stick to whatever evidence-free opinion you first come to.
4) So I assume you can show that every European country with Leopard tanks immediately took steps to begin shipping them to Ukraine after the German decision of 25th January? Because that is not the impression I have.
I'm sure you can explain to yourself why you were so heated then, but couldn't be bothered to make a single criticism afterwards of all the delays by other countries. But you are just kidding yourself.
I could go through this point-by-point, but I'll leave it at this: I *have* made criticisms of delays by other countries. I've made criticisms of delays by the UK. I guess you (like me) don't read every PB post; so you may have missed them.
I want Ukraine to get as much kit as possible as quickly as possible; and I've been criticised on here for that. My criticism of Germany, and of their blocking other countries, was consistent with this.
And as I say, Germany's done well since. So my views on this aren't based in any anti-German feeling - far from.
Sunak must be hoping that the Raab report is clear cut. If the conclusions are a bit wooly, and he has to make a decision, then the pressure is on him.
Sky saying Sunak will be giving the report his full attention and will drill down into the grey areas before coming to a considered decision
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
I waited just under 3 years for a double hernia operation here under Wales labour NHS and this was before covid
Sounds like you were stitched up.
Sorry.
A brief hiatus from posting from you might not go amiss after that comment.
It was funny
It should also be noted that I had a private diagnosis and the same surgeon operated on me on the Wales NHS nearly 3 years later
Sunak must be hoping that the Raab report is clear cut. If the conclusions are a bit wooly, and he has to make a decision, then the pressure is on him.
Sky saying Sunak will be giving the report his full attention and will drill down into the grey areas before coming to a considered decision
And maybe they've got a point, although there are still questions about how far the US will continue, and what the US aims are here, how the US sees the war ending.
I've never seen any US official articulate what their strategic goal is in Ukraine. We get plenty of pabulum about 'democracy' and 'freedom' no actual definition of success.
Sunak must be hoping that the Raab report is clear cut. If the conclusions are a bit wooly, and he has to make a decision, then the pressure is on him.
Sky saying Sunak will be giving the report his full attention and will drill down into the grey areas before coming to a considered decision
Unless the report is absolutely, undeniably, unequivocal in saying Raab is a bully he will stay. And the report will not be absolutely unequivocal.
The bigger issue is: what is the point of Raab? He is entirely ineffective as a minister and as a communicator. All he has is his throbbing forehead vein.
And maybe they've got a point, although there are still questions about how far the US will continue, and what the US aims are here, how the US sees the war ending.
I've never seen any US official articulate what their strategic goal is in Ukraine. We get plenty of pabulum about 'democracy' and 'freedom' no actual definition of success.
Probably because it's already been achieved? Sweden and Finland into NATO.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
LOL. Of course on PB "everyone understands".
I for one don't understand this. I mean it sounds kind of plausible. But it also sounds a lot like the some of the reasons/excuses for not supplying MBTs. For all I know it's easier for Ukraine's allies to find enough spare F-16s to make a difference, than it is to find enough spare working MBT's to make a difference. And maybe the F-16s are actually more needed in Ukraine than the MBTs. And how much extra training does an F-16 need compared to a Leopard 2? An extra month? an extra year?
And maybe they've got a point, although there are still questions about how far the US will continue, and what the US aims are here, how the US sees the war ending.
I've never seen any US official articulate what their strategic goal is in Ukraine. We get plenty of pabulum about 'democracy' and 'freedom' no actual definition of success.
The US didn't start the war; it's not part of some grand strategy for them. When Putin shows some signs of wanting to negotiate an end to his invasion, which doesn't just amount to 'let us keep what we've stolen', then maybe there's something to articulate.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
Make sure you don't accidentally leave it valid. Every election people have to be reminded that writing on it wont automatically invalidate, and that, yes, a penis in or around the box might well be deemed acceptable.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
The main reason why there isn't the same passion on here about Ukraine not getting F-16s is because it isn't Germans preventing it.
Or it could be because everyone understands the extra complexity of training someone on an aircraft type vs. an MBT, the relative lack of numbers, and the fact that nations have other missions for their F16s especially when Russia is playing silly buggers on the NATO border.
LOL. Of course on PB "everyone understands".
I for one don't understand this. I mean it sounds kind of plausible. But it also sounds a lot like the some of the reasons/excuses for not supplying MBTs. For all I know it's easier for Ukraine's allies to find enough spare F-16s to make a difference, than it is to find enough spare working MBT's to make a difference. And maybe the F-16s are actually more needed in Ukraine than the MBTs. And how much extra training does an F-16 need compared to a Leopard 2? An extra month? an extra year?
Comments
I'm just saying it's not clearcut and different answers are probably available depending what you include in the calculations. The general point may well stand. But if it's all about saving money, we shoot everyone on retirement day, don't we?
I'm planning on becoming a proper raver in my retirement.
I think there was precisely *one* conversation about it. Admittedly it got rather heated, but I fear you are gilding the lily a little.
2) "hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks"
You may not have noticed it, but people were.
3) "that was consistent German policy"
If what happened was 'consistent German policy", then I'm surprised anything ever gets done in Germany. It was an almighty mess, played out in public.
4) " Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?"
AIUI, yes - at least Leo, Leo2 and derivatives.
But as I've said, both here and in the past, Germany's done very well since. Once they decided to do it, they've done it well. But like all of this (and this is the case for all allied countries); it's later than it could have been.
The Ukrainians appear to be building up forces for an offensive - presumably for when the mud is finally gone/diminished to a reasonable level.
There was some video online of a test of British AS-90 in the current conditions.
That seems optimistic.
Shooting people on retirement seems a bit logans run but if I get a jenny agutter along the way I could live with it
I have however in the past suggested everyone should get a lifetime healthcare budget, with some exemptions for those born with conditions. They should then be expected to insure against exceeding the budget.
I compared the average annual costs per year for their respective adult lifetimes.
Which is what counts for government spending, over time.
Point is there's not a great deal of difference between healthy and obese.
Note the obese are also more likely to be unfit to work, which is an additional cost to government.
Smokers are good value for governments - assuming they are able to work.
I don’t agree with it, but I can see the argument on that basis for smokers/obese being a net drain within a given area while the overall population has good grace to die of a variety of things and spread it about a bit.
And BMI was invented in 1832 based on the ideas of a Belgian Astronomer who was trying to identify the average Belgian man in the 1830s...
It's a flawed method we use because everyone uses it.
In the same way that Covid initially wasn't an airborne diseases because the 1950's study on airborne diseases everyone used was taken as gospel
2) So not enough to notice.
3) Consistent German policy means that they said they wouldn't give new types of weapons systems to Ukraine if the US didn't, and that is what had happened in previous examples. I know I have explained this to you before but you are very stubborn, and prefer to just stick to whatever evidence-free opinion you first come to.
4) So I assume you can show that every European country with Leopard tanks immediately took steps to begin shipping them to Ukraine after the German decision of 25th January? Because that is not the impression I have.
I'm sure you can explain to yourself why you were so heated then, but couldn't be bothered to make a single criticism afterwards of all the delays by other countries. But you are just kidding yourself.
As I mentioned earlier it needs a Good Friday Agreement will from across the political divide to come up with acceptable solutions and make difficult decisions.
Unfortunately I do not see the politicians looking at the greater good in this way as each plays it as a political football and it continues to fail
It's a good lesson to learn in case of future, more serious pandemics.
The risks of them might be relatively small, but as we've seen, the costs can be enormous.
Again, I don’t agree with this line of logic because I am all in for “socialised” centrally run medicine, but I can see the argument.
I do support the best use of a resource argument - i.e. you don't give the liver to the person who is still likely to abuse alcohol if there's someone else in need who is not.
The personal budget idea has no benefits to me over full privatisation with health insurance with some minimum service for the poor (and I don't support that, either).
The face is that healthcare use is largely a lottery. You can make 'bad' decisions and drop dead from a heart attack without a day's hospital care in your life or you can be a picture of virtue and spend decades with MS (ok, MS probably covered under your exemptions, but lets say some unknown genetic disposition to poorer joints - my FiL, who was keen sportsman up to his forties, has had three hip replacements and a knee replacement with another one coming, so I suspect he'd be out of budget by now).
Where I think the linked studies are important is in exposing the fallacy that cutting obesity/smoking necessarily saves money. It does however, on average, give people more years of healthy life. But quite possibly a worse or at least longer final few years in poor health, which is something we have to grapple with.
"A reasoned old man with a warm heart that harbors only the kindest intentions, even if he tends to be a little gullible."
Definitely not Brando but a nice role.
Two anecdotal examples though. They have to be weighed up against the smokers/obese etc who die in their forties and never get to see their children grow up.
But you make some fair points about double standards.
(I'm not aware, FWIW, of much on last years of life - as opposed to lifespan or health years of life - related to lifestyle choices; that would be very interesting)
It's dreadful and not fit for purpose.
Why not less than 24 hrs ago I was speaking to someone whose wife had a brain tumour (benign) whose subsequent treatment would make you blanche. No one cares, everyone is looking for the easy option and the actual patient is overlooked time and again. Just the latest example.
I can guarantee that if you ask three of your friends about the NHS at least one of them will have a similarly shocking tale.
The NHS has more people working for it than ever before, it has more money than ever before....yet we are getting less healthcare than ever before. This is to mind a general malaise of the public sector we give them a pound they give us 50p worth of services
Not fretting about it but not blase would be about where I am.
I think it's a serious mistake by the Biden administration not to have supplied them.
The stuff about training is just quibbling; there's been plenty of time, and it's just served as an excuse for delaying the decision.
One of the leaked documents was very crudely doctored. Pro-Russian trolls swapped the Russian and Ukrainian death tolls and then pasted in a smaller number over the newly faked Russian death toll to boot.
It was pretty obvious tampering, so Carlson and Fox don't realistically believe it; it's just useful for them to push their narrative.
Plus I never criticised the Germans in the first place. Not just allowing, but enabling, the movement of large numbers of its MBT into a war zone with the express intent of killing Russians was a massive shift for the Germans and I quite understand why they felt more comfortable once we and the yanks joined it.
Sorry.
They could have done the training long before any decision.
It should also be noted that I had a private diagnosis and the same surgeon operated on me on the Wales NHS nearly 3 years later
Ooft 🔥 "On the upside though I guess It will be easier for them to have a whip-round amongst their membership as that number is dwindling to a point where most of them could fit into a Luxury Campervan! 😂🤣
https://twitter.com/markthehibby/status/1648993569577869314?s=20
Frustrated and tired: DeSantis’ demands wear out GOP Florida allies
DeSantis didn’t wow D.C. It’s not great in Tallahassee either.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/20/florida-republicans-
Eventually we should be able to swipe some sort of contactless thingy near a reader and get a full range of tickets and discounts automatically applied.
https://news.sky.com/story/betsi-cadwaladr-north-wales-health-board-placed-in-special-measures-12821455
How do you drill it into the inadequate that the best of her ability is woefully short of what is required?
But haven't got to the stage of recognising that a payment card is actually the same card, if used directly or via an electronic wallet on a smartphone.
Exhibit A - Amanda Spielman...
30 seconds on reading Apple's specs or 2 seconds of using it would tell them that.
2. Sunak won't fire Raaab
3. Incredulity from opposition / hacks batted away by Lee Anderson
4. Senior Civil Servants start to resign in alarming numbers, telling stories about the brute Raaaab
5. Sunak fires Raaaaaab. Tries to claim credit for doing so.
6. Incredulity from opposition / hacks batted away by Lee Anderson
I await it with interest
They have kept me royally entertained these past few weeks, better than a ticket to Jongleurs.
There are plenty of people in Germany who think Scholz did well to stick to his guns, as it were, for those 11 days and keep the US committed and Germany in lockstep with the US. And maybe they've got a point, although there are still questions about how far the US will continue, and what the US aims are here, how the US sees the war ending.
I want Ukraine to get as much kit as possible as quickly as possible; and I've been criticised on here for that. My criticism of Germany, and of their blocking other countries, was consistent with this.
And as I say, Germany's done well since. So my views on this aren't based in any anti-German feeling - far from.
The bigger issue is: what is the point of Raab? He is entirely ineffective as a minister and as a communicator. All he has is his throbbing forehead vein.
When Putin shows some signs of wanting to negotiate an end to his invasion, which doesn't just amount to 'let us keep what we've stolen', then maybe there's something to articulate.
Parliamentary election, 2010, East Worthing & Shoreham: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14984751.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_Katie-Hopkins.jpg
You could do it.
Landing, on the other hand. That's difficult.