I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
You're not sorry he was murdered??!
Don't be a prat
I'm not. I know it sounds horrible but I can't get exercised by it. The CEO knew what he was doing when he screwed over millions of policy holders by delaying and denying procedures and payments. It was his changes to the company's business practices that saw thousands of Americans die because they weren't getting treatment they'd paid insurance to receive. He really got what was coming to him in the end, it might just put the other health insurance company CEOs on notice too.
Yeah, but NO
This is cold-blooded murder on a Manhattan street, nothing else. Now, I can think of several hundred people I'd quite like - emotionally - to be gunned down on the streets of London - and many of them deserve it, morally - but I accept it is not right and should not happen, absent total war. You do yourself a disservice with remarks like this. Don't go mad. You're a valued PB commenter
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
He shouldn't have been shot though.
He should have been jailed for fraud, for selling a product that was never going to be delivered.
Insurance companies should get bankrupted by the market, but they don't and that's market failure.
I don't find UK health insurers very different*, but at least there is back up via the NHS.
*Exeter Friendly seems about the best. I don't think they have ever refused cover or underpaid my modest bills.
Ecclesiastical is fantastic
I don't recall ever dealing with them.
I wrote a header on 1 July 2018, that amongst other issues talked of how to expand the UK private medical sector. I think my idea of SIPP like savings for private health and social care, somewhat similar to the Singapore Medisave system has validity.
"This could be done via a combination of tax relief for private health insurance, vouchers for co-payment by the NHS to pay for an element of the private cost, and a Speedy Boarding co-payment for private wings at NHS hospitals. Private insurance has its merits, but insurance companies are rather prone to sell umbrellas on sunny days and take them back on rainy days, with nearly all policies excluding chronic conditions, mental illness, and pre-existing conditions.
Perhaps the answer for this is for individuals to be permitted to save for their own families health care in tax-deductible accounts analogous to private pensions, with the funds restricted to self funded health care. These could be preserved post retirement and include funding for approved social care. In many ways, such a system would be a return to the pre-NHS mix of workhouse hospitals, friendly societies and private provision, but better adapted to modern Britain."
We’ve had the final Verian poll for 2024 conducted for One News and it shows National leading Labour 37-29 with the Greens on 10, ACT on 8, the Māori Party on 7 and New Zealand First on 6.
The governing coalition leads 51-46 and would be comfortably re-elected on these numbers despite the clear tensions between ACT and NZF.
The big story here is about the Interislander Ferries, which are the route for passengers, cars and freight to cross the Cook Strait. Labour had proposed buying two new ferries when in Government but Nicola Willis, the incoming National finance minister, cancelled the order.
The problem is the current ferries are old and frequently break down. Yesterday Willis announced a new company would source two new ferries but the original replacements were due to enter service in 2026 but that’s now gone to 2029. It looks short sighted as an example of a critical infrastructure requirement needing to be updated but rather like Reeves in the UK with winter fuel allowance, Willis came in and wanted to set a new tone.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
No it isn't but we need to see the political will to do this, or whatever the solution will be.
One thing is for sure, we cannot keep just chucking cash at it. Any tax rise that is presented as there to "raise much needed taxes to go to the NHS" currently gets a free pass with the public.
It is about time we stopped treating our sainted NHS as some sort of national icon or religion.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
No, I am saying that all "reform" is not equal. Some works, some doesn't, and some "reforms" make things worse.
I think that part of the societal contract is that participants in the economy behave reasonably.
If people buy health insurance from a major provider, their expedition is for their health costs to be covered subject to any clearly stated limitations such as excesses.
US health insurance companies seem to have tried to maximise profit by reducing coverage via fine print that no reasonable person can be expected to read in advance, try to deny coverage even when it was valid (which is fraud), delay payment where there is coverage (which given the sums and interest involved is effectively theft) and then use their size and legal weight to stop people from disputing claims unless they happen to be wealthy themselves.
People cite 'profit maximisation for shareholders' but that principle does not extend to effectively defrauding your customers. Running a business where you generate profit but with happy customers is far more sustainable and in the long-term interests of shareholders too.
If companies act in a way that breaks this societal contract then they should expect some kind of reaction. The proper one should be lawsuits and regulatory action that wipe out their excess profits and more, combined with new regulations that make such practices impossible. In the absence of that, well you are running a big risk in a country as full of guns and violent as the US...
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
Smaller, more flexible units. Like Foundation Trusts, for example?
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
No, I am saying that all "reform" is not equal. Some works, some doesn't, and some "reforms" make things worse.
So what are the top three things you think need done ?
I went to one of those Turkish barbers today for a haircut. About 4 or 5 of them have opened recently in what is a fairly small town.
Do they actually cut hair? It's tempting to assume they're just another money-laundering operation.
We've had two open recently in the small sub-suburb where I live. My main objection is that the frontages are garish and horrible. Surely there isn't that much hair that needs cutting?
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
No, I am saying that all "reform" is not equal. Some works, some doesn't, and some "reforms" make things worse.
So what are the top three things you think need done ?
Though I do have some ideas on how to improve NHS productivity, that are cheap and likely to improve outcomes, patient satisfaction and job satisfaction. I might even knock them into another header when I have a quiet evening.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
Smaller, more flexible units. Like Foundation Trusts, for example?
Been there, done that, and how did it work out?
Better I suspect than the hugely centralised system which blew £10 billion quid on a failed computer system.
Im not a great supporter of centralisation I prefer businesses which ae closer to their customers and the NHS is getting further away from the people it is meant to serve. As you probably suspect I am not a fan of the NHS, however this is not ideological but based on experience where my family has usually but bad outcomes from dealings with the medical profession.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
No it isn't but we need to see the political will to do this, or whatever the solution will be.
One thing is for sure, we cannot keep just chucking cash at it. Any tax rise that is presented as there to "raise much needed taxes to go to the NHS" currently gets a free pass with the public.
It is about time we stopped treating our sainted NHS as some sort of national icon or religion.
Ask any Brit who’s lived abroad in an OECD country. The two worst systems are the UK and US, at either extreme. Pretty much anything else is better than the NHS, but it does require sufficient capacity in the system which costs money.
Even with the religious support, there’s still a limit to how much taxes can go up to get rid of the long waiting lists.
The ‘investment’ required is short term in overtime and temp jobs to clear the backlog, and medium term in more facilities and more efficient use of capital equipment. An efficient airline keeps its planes in the air 18 hours per day, hospitals should be able to do the same with theatres and scanners.
I went to one of those Turkish barbers today for a haircut. About 4 or 5 of them have opened recently in what is a fairly small town.
Do they actually cut hair? It's tempting to assume they're just another money-laundering operation.
We've had two open recently in the small sub-suburb where I live. My main objection is that the frontages are garish and horrible. Surely there isn't that much hair that needs cutting?
I think modern fade type cuts require quite a lot more maintenance than the shaggy locks of my youth.
I believe Phil Foden gets his hair cut every week. Astonishing, I agree, considering it looks naff, but that seems to be what he is aiming for.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
No, I am saying that all "reform" is not equal. Some works, some doesn't, and some "reforms" make things worse.
So what are the top three things you think need done ?
Though I do have some ideas on how to improve NHS productivity, that are cheap and likely to improve outcomes, patient satisfaction and job satisfaction. I might even knock them into another header when I have a quiet evening.
Cerainly Id be interested to see your latest views. Streeting has come in on a platform of change and is at least prepared to accept the NHS is on a downward path. It will be interesting to see if he can make some changes or gets nobbled by vested interests.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
You're not sorry he was murdered??!
Don't be a prat
I'm not. I know it sounds horrible but I can't get exercised by it. The CEO knew what he was doing when he screwed over millions of policy holders by delaying and denying procedures and payments. It was his changes to the company's business practices that saw thousands of Americans die because they weren't getting treatment they'd paid insurance to receive. He really got what was coming to him in the end, it might just put the other health insurance company CEOs on notice too.
Yeah, but NO
This is cold-blooded murder on a Manhattan street, nothing else. Now, I can think of several hundred people I'd quite like - emotionally - to be gunned down on the streets of London - and many of them deserve it, morally - but I accept it is not right and should not happen, absent total war. You do yourself a disservice with remarks like this. Don't go mad. You're a valued PB commenter
He was personally responsible for more deaths than any serial killer in history. It feels like a classic example of the trolley problem.
Kill the CEO. Save ten thousand of his customer's lives.
There's an argument there.
Brian Thompson defrauded people from whom he collected insurance premiums. And, he benefitted personally from defrauding them.
He sold insurance policies that he had no intention of honouring. Under his leadership, UHC’s rate of refusal of claims soared.
What he deserved was not death, but a very long period of incarceration.
Sure, but if you don't give people reform they will give you revolution - that's basically why the welfare state exists.
Similarly, state legal systems evolved to keep the King's Peace, to provide a system of justice so that people didn't go around murdering each other to obtain perceived justice. Two tier Keir is an effective bit of propaganda in Britain, but a two tier justice system in the US is very much a reality.
If the legal system does not give people justice then they will seek justice by other means.
I don't agree, as some here have argued, that the CEO was a blind automaton following the logic of his fiduciary duty to his shareholders. He had choices and he made deliberate choices that resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people. And what justice were his victims ever likely to obtain?
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
No it isn't but we need to see the political will to do this, or whatever the solution will be.
One thing is for sure, we cannot keep just chucking cash at it. Any tax rise that is presented as there to "raise much needed taxes to go to the NHS" currently gets a free pass with the public.
It is about time we stopped treating our sainted NHS as some sort of national icon or religion.
Ask any Brit who’s lived abroad in an OECD country. The two worst systems are the UK and US, at either extreme. Pretty much anything else is better than the NHS, but it does require sufficient capacity in the system which costs money.
Even with the religious support, there’s still a limit to how much taxes can go up to get rid of the long waiting lists.
The ‘investment’ required is short term in overtime and temp jobs to clear the backlog, and medium term in more facilities and more efficient use of capital equipment. An efficient airline keeps its planes in the air 18 hours per day, hospitals should be able to do the same with theatres and scanners.
The expensive thing in healthcare is not the pharmaceuticals or the construction of operating theatres, it is the cost of staff. Training, motivating and retaining staff is key to productivity and quality.
It's also recognised that operations done at night time have significantly worse outcomes.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
You're not sorry he was murdered??!
Don't be a prat
I'm not. I know it sounds horrible but I can't get exercised by it. The CEO knew what he was doing when he screwed over millions of policy holders by delaying and denying procedures and payments. It was his changes to the company's business practices that saw thousands of Americans die because they weren't getting treatment they'd paid insurance to receive. He really got what was coming to him in the end, it might just put the other health insurance company CEOs on notice too.
Yeah, but NO
This is cold-blooded murder on a Manhattan street, nothing else. Now, I can think of several hundred people I'd quite like - emotionally - to be gunned down on the streets of London - and many of them deserve it, morally - but I accept it is not right and should not happen, absent total war. You do yourself a disservice with remarks like this. Don't go mad. You're a valued PB commenter
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
No, I am saying that all "reform" is not equal. Some works, some doesn't, and some "reforms" make things worse.
I agree with that. Reform isn't an end in itself. And healthcare is an incredibly difficult area to get right - people's expectations will never be met completely with the resources available, and there is no perfect system.
But the point I responded to was that Labour was amazing and the Conservatives were rubbish, whereas the evidence on productivity, as well as from Wales (and Scotland when Labour were in charge there) is to the contrary. Labour only got slightly better outcomes by spending hugely more without reforming EFFECTIVELY, thereby inevitably running in to diminishing returns, bottlenecks, public sector unions and other blockages.
And, predictably, productivity stagnated, or even fell in some years.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
Hang on: while I agree he was an arsehole, I'm not sure the best way to dispense justice is via silenced pistols on street corners.
No, I don't think it's the best way either, yet justice was done where it wouldn't otherwise have been by the regulators or justice system. I'm honestly going to be surprised if they can find 12 jurors to convict this guy in New York, there's a lot of sympathy for this guy across the political spectrum from what I can tell. Trump voters and Dems alike are aligned.
In no way whatsoever was justice done.
Justice would have given him the right to answer for his alleged crimes.
Justice is not murder
But what would his answer have been? And how many people would have been convinced by it?
My experience with insurance in the UK has been excellent. No quibbles, lots of guidance to help solve a problem before it gets worse, quick response over the phone.
I think car insurance premiums are something to watch though. The cuts in road policing has probably cost UK drivers far more than the savings made in the police budget.
I went to one of those Turkish barbers today for a haircut. About 4 or 5 of them have opened recently in what is a fairly small town.
Do they actually cut hair? It's tempting to assume they're just another money-laundering operation.
We've had two open recently in the small sub-suburb where I live. My main objection is that the frontages are garish and horrible. Surely there isn't that much hair that needs cutting?
Less and less hair in my case 🙁
My barber is an Iraqi Kurd, and we’ve had some quite interesting conversations. Yesterday on Syria he said there are few connections between Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish Kurds, and that was one of the reasons there would never be a Kurdish homeland. He uses English as the, er, lingua franca when he meets Kurds from other parts of the diaspora.
I think that part of the societal contract is that participants in the economy behave reasonably.
If people buy health insurance from a major provider, their expedition is for their health costs to be covered subject to any clearly stated limitations such as excesses.
US health insurance companies seem to have tried to maximise profit by reducing coverage via fine print that no reasonable person can be expected to read in advance, try to deny coverage even when it was valid (which is fraud), delay payment where there is coverage (which given the sums and interest involved is effectively theft) and then use their size and legal weight to stop people from disputing claims unless they happen to be wealthy themselves.
People cite 'profit maximisation for shareholders' but that principle does not extend to effectively defrauding your customers. Running a business where you generate profit but with happy customers is far more sustainable and in the long-term interests of shareholders too.
If companies act in a way that breaks this societal contract then they should expect some kind of reaction. The proper one should be lawsuits and regulatory action that wipe out their excess profits and more, combined with new regulations that make such practices impossible. In the absence of that, well you are running a big risk in a country as full of guns and violent as the US...
And that's why I'm not sorry, these companies are perpetrating a fraud against the American people with no hope of prosecution by a justice system which is likely in receipt if billions in donations/lobbying from said companies to keep them off the agenda. Those few people who are seemingly upset by this don't seem to want to see just how bad it has become with companies effectively a law unto themselves, tying up ordinary people in litigation for years while they and their relatives deteriorate due to not receiving healthcare. Friends and family dying because coverage was wrongly denied or payments delayed for no good reason.
As much as I shit on the NHS, the US healthcare system is a complete disaster zone of self interested companies and a management class that is incentivised not to proved best in class service but to minimise the amount of healthcare provision per customer by any means necessary, even fraudulently.
As you say, the chance of the people against whom this fraud is being perpetrated ever seeing "justice" is lower than zero. Three bullets to head seems to be the only way they will ever see any justice.
I hope now we get some class action suits against these companies and they all end up going under with the CEOs and other management serving jail time for policies that led to the deaths of thousands of people. What do you think the chances are of that happening?
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
No it isn't but we need to see the political will to do this, or whatever the solution will be.
One thing is for sure, we cannot keep just chucking cash at it. Any tax rise that is presented as there to "raise much needed taxes to go to the NHS" currently gets a free pass with the public.
It is about time we stopped treating our sainted NHS as some sort of national icon or religion.
Ask any Brit who’s lived abroad in an OECD country. The two worst systems are the UK and US, at either extreme. Pretty much anything else is better than the NHS, but it does require sufficient capacity in the system which costs money.
Even with the religious support, there’s still a limit to how much taxes can go up to get rid of the long waiting lists.
The ‘investment’ required is short term in overtime and temp jobs to clear the backlog, and medium term in more facilities and more efficient use of capital equipment. An efficient airline keeps its planes in the air 18 hours per day, hospitals should be able to do the same with theatres and scanners.
People find it difficult to accept that most of the reason the NHS has long waiting lists is because we choose to provide so many services with a rather small budget (eg 11% of GDP v 17% in the US).
The vicious cycle of technological progress allowing us to keep deeply unhealthy people alive for decades is a choice, ultimately. There has been extraordinary progress in heart disease, for example, and now all those (mainly) men now have dementia instead. We could withdraw those treatments and save loads of money. Or introduce Whitty's fat tax.
The other part of the service that is super expensive is birth and death. But we are not going to cut those services any time soon.
Tesla's letter to the Govt wanting more tax on petrol and diesel. No wonder he's pissed after the budget - a politician who won't do what he wants, even after he said please. At least he had the sense not to puff the Cybertruck, though he does promote his Semi.
I wouldn't get a Tesla if they gave them away free. That's how much he's sh*t on his brand.
I must admit that I find the recent strength in Tesla stock a bit odd: they've shat on their brand in Europe, in China they are likely to be the first company impacted by any retaliation to Trump's tariffs, and in the US people in Red states aren't buying Teslas.
The main thing I don’t understand about Tesla is that they have access to billions, they can poach the best car designers in the world to design their sports cars, saloons, 4wds, whatever, And yet every single car they design (apart from that old knock-off lotus Elise) looks like some absolutely dull car with not the tiniest bit of style or a skip on wheels.
(Leaving aside the Cybertruck for a second...)
That's because they are optmizing around drag coefficient. When your battery capacity was small, every tiny aero gain made a big difference.
Good point, well made. They are still ugly cars and a little bit of drag for a better looking car might be more popular than a little more range. This is just one reason why I’m. It a car designer or pioneer of technology perhaps.
Many electric cars follow the same pattern - trying to get the Cd to near 0.2 or even below.
Ok, thinking (lazily) about your point, and RCS’, all cars ICE or electric could/should be designed to their maximum efficiency but a lot aren’t because humans like many things where the perfect is overridden by the heart or soul. People will buy a Ferrari because it’s beautiful and powerful but not remotely efficient, or a G-Wagen. So surely at some point Tesla has to give a little on aero to attract the soul?
Tesla (and others) have noted that when they launch a range of cars with different range, the best sellers are those with the longest range. In fact several times, Tesla discontinued the shortest range option because not enough people were buying it, to make it non-profitable to sell.
So until people are comfortable with range, range will be everything in EVs.
I remember when there was a hurricane in Florida a few years ago Tesla made all the short range cars into long range cars via a download.
There was outrage that people had been spending 10a of thousand for what was essentially a computer programme…
What happened was that the shortest range car was made by selling a longer range vehicle with a software restriction. It was cheaper to include the larger battery, rather than make a separate, smaller one.
It actually gave slightly better value - as the battery degraded, it would “use” the unused extra capacity. So the car would retain its full, as sold, range for about 20 years.
Since when did people let facts get in the way of outrage?
I went to one of those Turkish barbers today for a haircut. About 4 or 5 of them have opened recently in what is a fairly small town.
Do they actually cut hair? It's tempting to assume they're just another money-laundering operation.
We've had two open recently in the small sub-suburb where I live. My main objection is that the frontages are garish and horrible. Surely there isn't that much hair that needs cutting?
Less and less hair in my case 🙁
My barber is an Iraqi Kurd, and we’ve had some quite interesting conversations. Yesterday on Syria he said there are few connections between Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish Kurds, and that was one of the reasons there would never be a Kurdish homeland. He uses English as the, er, lingua franca when he meets Kurds from other parts of the diaspora.
I've made this point in the past - there is a great deal that separates the different nationalities of Kurds. Mainly because they've had a hundred years or more of those countries repressing the Kurdish identity.
It is why, when the Syrian civil war started, there were three or four different Kurdish fighting groups, working pretty much independently, albeit with the same aims. They took four or five years to form a top-level leadership, and AIUI even the 'battalions' are still separate, due to language differences. They're a blooming effective fighting force, though.
Wow! Just five years ago today saw the Boris Johnson landslide that would see him preside over a further five unprecedented election wins and become the United Kingdom's greatest and longest serving Prime Minister.
A chastening lesson to those on the Right of British politics who wish to destroy our NHS and foist upon us a system loosely based on the American model.
For ALL it's faults we simply have to retain the NHS as the CORE medical provision.
The British public know that - opinion polls invariably support this fact and LABOUR are the only Party who can be trusted with it.
The evidence of rebuild and improvement 1997 to 2010 and then the usual Tory destruction 2020 to 2024 is crystal clear!
Rubbish. NHS productivity increased by 1.5% per year between 2010 and the pandemic but only 0.6% between 1997 and 2010 as Brown showered money on the NHS without reforming it, as Blair to do him justice later realised. Labour would have been worse since the pandemic as they believed in even longer lockdowns, which damaged the health service so heavily.
And that's before even mentioning their disastrous record with NHS Wales, where despite more funding, the health service is less efficient and delivers significantly worse patient outcomes than NHS England.
The Conservatives aren't great, but Labour is wasteful and incompetent at running the health service, just like they are at everything else.
That's not true
The NHS was quite heavily "reformed" between 1997 and 2010, notably the Milburn reforms of the early noughties.
That these seem to have adversely impacted productivity should perhaps give "reformers" pause for thought, but it seems not. Their ideological zeal is not bothered by reflecting on what previous rounds of "reform" achieved.
So youre saying the NHS is unreformable ?
It's appetite for cash remains undiminished. However much money is hosed at the NHS the solution to all of its problems is more money.
We need to break it down in to smaller more flexible units. The idea we can just keep pumping money in to a failing service isnt sustainable.
No it isn't but we need to see the political will to do this, or whatever the solution will be.
One thing is for sure, we cannot keep just chucking cash at it. Any tax rise that is presented as there to "raise much needed taxes to go to the NHS" currently gets a free pass with the public.
It is about time we stopped treating our sainted NHS as some sort of national icon or religion.
Ask any Brit who’s lived abroad in an OECD country. The two worst systems are the UK and US, at either extreme. Pretty much anything else is better than the NHS, but it does require sufficient capacity in the system which costs money.
Even with the religious support, there’s still a limit to how much taxes can go up to get rid of the long waiting lists.
The ‘investment’ required is short term in overtime and temp jobs to clear the backlog, and medium term in more facilities and more efficient use of capital equipment. An efficient airline keeps its planes in the air 18 hours per day, hospitals should be able to do the same with theatres and scanners.
People find it difficult to accept that most of the reason the NHS has long waiting lists is because we choose to provide so many services with a rather small budget (eg 11% of GDP v 17% in the US).
The vicious cycle of technological progress allowing us to keep deeply unhealthy people alive for decades is a choice, ultimately. There has been extraordinary progress in heart disease, for example, and now all those (mainly) men now have dementia instead. We could withdraw those treatments and save loads of money. Or introduce Whitty's fat tax.
The other part of the service that is super expensive is birth and death. But we are not going to cut those services any time soon.
The amount the US pays on healthcare is an outlier, and certainly shouldn’t be a target for the NHS!
We’ve had the final Verian poll for 2024 conducted for One News and it shows National leading Labour 37-29 with the Greens on 10, ACT on 8, the Māori Party on 7 and New Zealand First on 6.
The governing coalition leads 51-46 and would be comfortably re-elected on these numbers despite the clear tensions between ACT and NZF.
The big story here is about the Interislander Ferries, which are the route for passengers, cars and freight to cross the Cook Strait. Labour had proposed buying two new ferries when in Government but Nicola Willis, the incoming National finance minister, cancelled the order.
The problem is the current ferries are old and frequently break down. Yesterday Willis announced a new company would source two new ferries but the original replacements were due to enter service in 2026 but that’s now gone to 2029. It looks short sighted as an example of a critical infrastructure requirement needing to be updated but rather like Reeves in the UK with winter fuel allowance, Willis came in and wanted to set a new tone.
I believe Scotland has some ferries to spare?
The bit that is strange is that there is a brisk international trade in second hand ferries. Of all sizes. Yes, the condition varies from mint to horrible. But if you have someone competent to do the arranging, you can rent a ferry for x years, while the new ones are building.
These days, getting small ships to a destination, if they are too small for deep ocean, is just a matter of deck ship hire to carry them.
Wow! Just five years ago today saw the Boris Johnson landslide that would see him preside over a further five unprecedented election wins and become the United Kingdom's greatest and longest serving Prime Minister.
I remember the narrative well.
TBF I'd have preferred that alternative history to the reality of Covid and Ukraine.
I went to one of those Turkish barbers today for a haircut. About 4 or 5 of them have opened recently in what is a fairly small town.
Do they actually cut hair? It's tempting to assume they're just another money-laundering operation.
In my experience Turkish barbers (I think a lot of them are Kurds) are happy to see to me and are quite good at cutting hair. It's a skill, as I know from my own hopeless efforts.
This suggests to me that they are not exclusively, or probably mainly, money laundering operations. Admittedly my evidence is only a bit more solid than Nigel Farage for his assertion to the contrary.
I think that part of the societal contract is that participants in the economy behave reasonably.
If people buy health insurance from a major provider, their expedition is for their health costs to be covered subject to any clearly stated limitations such as excesses.
US health insurance companies seem to have tried to maximise profit by reducing coverage via fine print that no reasonable person can be expected to read in advance, try to deny coverage even when it was valid (which is fraud), delay payment where there is coverage (which given the sums and interest involved is effectively theft) and then use their size and legal weight to stop people from disputing claims unless they happen to be wealthy themselves.
People cite 'profit maximisation for shareholders' but that principle does not extend to effectively defrauding your customers. Running a business where you generate profit but with happy customers is far more sustainable and in the long-term interests of shareholders too.
If companies act in a way that breaks this societal contract then they should expect some kind of reaction. The proper one should be lawsuits and regulatory action that wipe out their excess profits and more, combined with new regulations that make such practices impossible. In the absence of that, well you are running a big risk in a country as full of guns and violent as the US...
And that's why I'm not sorry, these companies are perpetrating a fraud against the American people with no hope of prosecution by a justice system which is likely in receipt if billions in donations/lobbying from said companies to keep them off the agenda. Those few people who are seemingly upset by this don't seem to want to see just how bad it has become with companies effectively a law unto themselves, tying up ordinary people in litigation for years while they and their relatives deteriorate due to not receiving healthcare. Friends and family dying because coverage was wrongly denied or payments delayed for no good reason.
As much as I shit on the NHS, the US healthcare system is a complete disaster zone of self interested companies and a management class that is incentivised not to proved best in class service but to minimise the amount of healthcare provision per customer by any means necessary, even fraudulently.
As you say, the chance of the people against whom this fraud is being perpetrated ever seeing "justice" is lower than zero. Three bullets to head seems to be the only way they will ever see any justice.
I hope now we get some class action suits against these companies and they all end up going under with the CEOs and other management serving jail time for policies that led to the deaths of thousands of people. What do you think the chances are of that happening?
CEOs will never get jail.
I can imagine some class actions being successful (this is the US) but I suspect any times will be tiny compared to excess profits generated from this fraud.
What I don't think these companies understand is you can't have your cake and eat it with exploitation. The longer you get away with it with no legal recompense for victims, the more likely these kinds of extra judicial actions become.
"Don't be a dick" should be taught in US business schools
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
He shouldn't have been shot though.
He should have been jailed for fraud, for selling a product that was never going to be delivered.
Insurance companies should get bankrupted by the market, but they don't and that's market failure.
I don't find UK health insurers very different*, but at least there is back up via the NHS.
*Exeter Friendly seems about the best. I don't think they have ever refused cover or underpaid my modest bills.
Ecclesiastical is fantastic
I don't recall ever dealing with them.
I wrote a header on 1 July 2018, that amongst other issues talked of how to expand the UK private medical sector. I think my idea of SIPP like savings for private health and social care, somewhat similar to the Singapore Medisave system has validity.
"This could be done via a combination of tax relief for private health insurance, vouchers for co-payment by the NHS to pay for an element of the private cost, and a Speedy Boarding co-payment for private wings at NHS hospitals. Private insurance has its merits, but insurance companies are rather prone to sell umbrellas on sunny days and take them back on rainy days, with nearly all policies excluding chronic conditions, mental illness, and pre-existing conditions.
Perhaps the answer for this is for individuals to be permitted to save for their own families health care in tax-deductible accounts analogous to private pensions, with the funds restricted to self funded health care. These could be preserved post retirement and include funding for approved social care. In many ways, such a system would be a return to the pre-NHS mix of workhouse hospitals, friendly societies and private provision, but better adapted to modern Britain."
Sure - convalescence homes are important too, and getting away from the the one size fits all DGH model.
But there are also simple things that are politically toxic. For example, the refusal to allow top up treatments.
NICE/doctor says “X” is the right protocol. Patient says “but I want Y” as well
At the moment the patient can’t have Y privately without paying *all* of the costs of X. It’s fine to ask them to pay for Y and perhaps a premium (like a corkage fee) but not make it impossible for anyone to afford Y by fully loading the cost (to be clear, I’m referring to approved therapies that NICE doesn’t believe are justified for the NHS not BS jungle juice)
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
As someone who didn't vote Labour I would just say I'm fed up with hearing (and not just on here) people saying how terrible Labour are, they're the worst government ever.
Objectively, they have only had a few months, some of which was the summer recess, so they are unlikely to have fixed any of the deep-rooted issues left for them by 9 or 14 years of Tory rule (depending on where you start counting). Have all the people bellyaching been asleep for the past 9 years? It has been one shambles after another, with 3 successive administrations each being the worst in my adult lifetime until Sunak was a slight uptick after Truss.
Perhaps less objectively, they have been poor at communications, timidly conservative and generally underwhelming. But they are a vast improvement on what has gone before; there is a seriousness of purpose that has been missing for a long time.
Most of the noise is from the right, unused to being out of power, but also from the left who see the current government as Tory by another name (which it is, to be fair, partly out of necessity). So there are few natural supporters; I am centrist and don't support Labour so I'm critical, but I'd still much rather a Starmer government than anything the Tories have offered in my lifetime except perhaps for Cameron's version (and he ultimately fails for messing up over Brexit).
I agree they are not as terrible as the last lot, but they should have made no unforced errors, (WFA, IHT, and when they broke their promise on no IT/NI/VAT rises they should have broken it by raising VAT).
'Poor at comms' covers a big area. As they had an agenda starting from disastrous, commanding the narrative was the first priority. As nothing could get better quickly, and taxes had to rise, (and will have to again) the story of 'where are we going and how are we going to get there' had to be fabulously well told and constantly reiterated.
It isn't even possible to discern their direction of travel on migration - which can be an election losing/winning matter. And Angela Rayner was disastrous this week on the relationship of housing need and migration.
What did Rayner do/say this week on housing and migration?!
When she was asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky where will she house all the immigrants she said there is no shortage of homes
That is stupendously dumb and clumsy
Yet it's been the unspoken position of the pro-immigration lobby for the last 25 years. They can just keep coming indefinitely.
It's more that, to suggest that immigration has any costs/issues is considered "anti-immigration" or "pandering to the far right".
Reform will win in 2028. I feel it in my bones
The General Election is on 3rd May 2029 though.
For Reform to win in *2028*: 1) Would need Labour to be well ahead in the polls for Starmer to call an early election 2) Starmer proceeds to have a car crash of a campaign which makes Theresa May's 2017 one look like Obama's 2008 election campaign 3) Badenoch continues to be useless 4) Reform has a set of policies which appeal beyond it's anti-immigration, anti-woke core base. This includes having something to offer younger, working age people in terms of housing, cost of living etc.
You’ve forgotten that UK governments almost never proceed to the full term. They almost always find a reason to go beforehand - eg Rishi Sunak
The last time we saw a full term was Gordon Brown in 2010? IIRC?
And your forgetting the Reform vote is a protest vote - a none of the above vote. They get as many votes as they now get, on the basis they aren’t going to get anywhere near power. Reform have no credibility to their policies - the country is full, so there won’t be any immigration under us, is as detailed as their policy gets.
Also FPTP prevents happening here what happened in America. Even with PR, and many more Reform MPs even largest party, no one will coalition with them.
How does FPTP prevent what happened in America when America uses FPTP?
Because we use FPTP for MPs, and PM commands support of MPs in parliament, we don’t directly elect PM like US directly elects President. 😏
Yes, it's a pretty fundamental difference. Here MPs can and do chuck out Prime Ministers. The electoral college is a once-only process to confirm who will be inaugurated as president.
Would US politics and discourse improve if some of its elections were under PR? Would that stop it being a two party system, and the quality of candidates and debate improve by it becoming multi party?
The level of discourse is determined by the franchise, not the voting system. If you want to improve the quality, you should restrict the franchise.
How has the franchise in the UK changed since the 1970s? I mention this, because the quality of political debate has notably worsened since then.
Is it just possible that there might be other factors - such as social media - that have acted to worsen the quality of discourse?
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson has finally convinced me that social media is not a good thing.
Because the businesses that run it have worked out they can make more money by appealing to the worst aspects of human behaviour.
That's why it needs to be regulated. All human interactions are.
If you're a dickhead, horrendously drunk or disruptive in a pub, you get thrown out. But, if you're well behaved you can put your case to the regulars and try whatever argument you like.
I'm not sorry that the UHC CEO got offed. He seemed like a complete arsehole, under his leadership UHC denials rose to 30% and further 30% reported delays in payments and treatments. If the government isn't willing to properly regulate these industries then people will react to these changes driven by management. It's almost Newtonian. The US healthcare system is completely fucked up and the people are very, very angry about it. There's a reason that few if any politicians or other business leaders have condemned the killing because there's a realisation that in chasing profit and share value UHC has overseen actual deaths by denying and delaying claims.
The sad part to me is that the CEO comes from a pretty humble background and he seemed to betray everything that helped him get ahead in life and denied that same chance to millions of others with frankly parasitic policies on healthcare payouts. It's sad that someone died over this and really it's the politicians and lobbyists that deserve the ire, but the CEOs being in the target isn't surprising.
I really hope that this is a turning point for US healthcare regulations and insurance companies won't just be able to unilaterally deny and delay payments and treatments without any recourse for policy holders other than a costly lawsuit that they can't afford which the insurance company will defend with millions of dollars.
I think nothing will change ultimately and Americans will get even more angry. They will vote for someone who promises to hang the CEOs from lampposts in that scenario, they're already half way there with Trump.
Hang on: while I agree he was an arsehole, I'm not sure the best way to dispense justice is via silenced pistols on street corners.
No, I don't think it's the best way either, yet justice was done where it wouldn't otherwise have been by the regulators or justice system. I'm honestly going to be surprised if they can find 12 jurors to convict this guy in New York, there's a lot of sympathy for this guy across the political spectrum from what I can tell. Trump voters and Dems alike are aligned.
In no way whatsoever was justice done.
Justice would have given him the right to answer for his alleged crimes.
Justice is not murder
But what would his answer have been? And how many people would have been convinced by it?
Probably that he was doing his job. And I doubt many would have been convinced he was a good person. But that’s not the same as committing a crime
Comments
I wrote a header on 1 July 2018, that amongst other issues talked of how to expand the UK private medical sector. I think my idea of SIPP like savings for private health and social care, somewhat similar to the Singapore Medisave system has validity.
"This could be done via a combination of tax relief for private health insurance, vouchers for co-payment by the NHS to pay for an element of the private cost, and a Speedy Boarding co-payment for private wings at NHS hospitals. Private insurance has its merits, but insurance companies are rather prone to sell umbrellas on sunny days and take them back on rainy days, with nearly all policies excluding chronic conditions, mental illness, and pre-existing conditions.
Perhaps the answer for this is for individuals to be permitted to save for their own families health care in tax-deductible accounts analogous to private pensions, with the funds restricted to self funded health care. These could be preserved post retirement and include funding for approved social care. In many ways, such a system would be a return to the pre-NHS mix of workhouse hospitals, friendly societies and private provision, but better adapted to modern Britain."
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2018/07/01/three-score-and-ten-has-the-nhs-reached-the-end-of-its-natural-life/
One thing is for sure, we cannot keep just chucking cash at it. Any tax rise that is presented as there to "raise much needed taxes to go to the NHS" currently gets a free pass with the public.
It is about time we stopped treating our sainted NHS as some sort of national icon or religion.
If people buy health insurance from a major provider, their expedition is for their health costs to be covered subject to any clearly stated limitations such as excesses.
US health insurance companies seem to have tried to maximise profit by reducing coverage via fine print that no reasonable person can be expected to read in advance, try to deny coverage even when it was valid (which is fraud), delay payment where there is coverage (which given the sums and interest involved is effectively theft) and then use their size and legal weight to stop people from disputing claims unless they happen to be wealthy themselves.
People cite 'profit maximisation for shareholders' but that principle does not extend to effectively defrauding your customers. Running a business where you generate profit but with happy customers is far more sustainable and in the long-term interests of shareholders too.
If companies act in a way that breaks this societal contract then they should expect some kind of reaction. The proper one should be lawsuits and regulatory action that wipe out their excess profits and more, combined with new regulations that make such practices impossible. In the absence of that, well you are running a big risk in a country as full of guns and violent as the US...
Been there, done that, and how did it work out?
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2018/07/01/three-score-and-ten-has-the-nhs-reached-the-end-of-its-natural-life/
Though I do have some ideas on how to improve NHS productivity, that are cheap and likely to improve outcomes, patient satisfaction and job satisfaction. I might even knock them into another header when I have a quiet evening.
Im not a great supporter of centralisation I prefer businesses which ae closer to their customers and the NHS is getting further away from the people it is meant to serve. As you probably suspect I am not a fan of the NHS, however this is not ideological but based on experience where my family has usually but bad outcomes from dealings with the medical profession.
Even with the religious support, there’s still a limit to how much taxes can go up to get rid of the long waiting lists.
The ‘investment’ required is short term in overtime and temp jobs to clear the backlog, and medium term in more facilities and more efficient use of capital equipment. An efficient airline keeps its planes in the air 18 hours per day, hospitals should be able to do the same with theatres and scanners.
I believe Phil Foden gets his hair cut every week. Astonishing, I agree, considering it looks naff, but that seems to be what he is aiming for.
Similarly, state legal systems evolved to keep the King's Peace, to provide a system of justice so that people didn't go around murdering each other to obtain perceived justice. Two tier Keir is an effective bit of propaganda in Britain, but a two tier justice system in the US is very much a reality.
If the legal system does not give people justice then they will seek justice by other means.
I don't agree, as some here have argued, that the CEO was a blind automaton following the logic of his fiduciary duty to his shareholders. He had choices and he made deliberate choices that resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people. And what justice were his victims ever likely to obtain?
It's also recognised that operations done at night time have significantly worse outcomes.
But the point I responded to was that Labour was amazing and the Conservatives were rubbish, whereas the evidence on productivity, as well as from Wales (and Scotland when Labour were in charge there) is to the contrary. Labour only got slightly better outcomes by spending hugely more without reforming EFFECTIVELY, thereby inevitably running in to diminishing returns, bottlenecks, public sector unions and other blockages.
And, predictably, productivity stagnated, or even fell in some years.
I think car insurance premiums are something to watch though. The cuts in road policing has probably cost UK drivers far more than the savings made in the police budget.
My barber is an Iraqi Kurd, and we’ve had some quite interesting conversations. Yesterday on Syria he said there are few connections between Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish Kurds, and that was one of the reasons there would never be a Kurdish homeland. He uses English as the, er, lingua franca when he meets Kurds from other parts of the diaspora.
Paying for Christmas with cash this year? You're not alone! More shoppers spending with notes and coins to help budget
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-14177533/Paying-Christmas-cash-year-Youre-not-shoppers-spending-notes-coins-help-budget.html
As much as I shit on the NHS, the US healthcare system is a complete disaster zone of self interested companies and a management class that is incentivised not to proved best in class service but to minimise the amount of healthcare provision per customer by any means necessary, even fraudulently.
As you say, the chance of the people against whom this fraud is being perpetrated ever seeing "justice" is lower than zero. Three bullets to head seems to be the only way they will ever see any justice.
I hope now we get some class action suits against these companies and they all end up going under with the CEOs and other management serving jail time for policies that led to the deaths of thousands of people. What do you think the chances are of that happening?
The vicious cycle of technological progress allowing us to keep deeply unhealthy people alive for decades is a choice, ultimately. There has been extraordinary progress in heart disease, for example, and now all those (mainly) men now have dementia instead. We could withdraw those treatments and save loads of money. Or introduce Whitty's fat tax.
The other part of the service that is super expensive is birth and death. But we are not going to cut those services any time soon.
{starts cleaning the Welrod}
It is why, when the Syrian civil war started, there were three or four different Kurdish fighting groups, working pretty much independently, albeit with the same aims. They took four or five years to form a top-level leadership, and AIUI even the 'battalions' are still separate, due to language differences. They're a blooming effective fighting force, though.
‘You want to protect American jobs?
Strengthen the American work ethic.’
https://x.com/chadcarleton/status/1866646887757148218?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
I remember the narrative well.
NEW THREAD
These days, getting small ships to a destination, if they are too small for deep ocean, is just a matter of deck ship hire to carry them.
LOL.
5 months in power and after inheriting the total chaos that is the DWP.
This suggests to me that they are not exclusively, or probably mainly, money laundering operations. Admittedly my evidence is only a bit more solid than Nigel Farage for his assertion to the contrary.
I can imagine some class actions being successful (this is the US) but I suspect any times will be tiny compared to excess profits generated from this fraud.
What I don't think these companies understand is you can't have your cake and eat it with exploitation. The longer you get away with it with no legal recompense for victims, the more likely these kinds of extra judicial actions become.
"Don't be a dick" should be taught in US business schools
But there are also simple things that are politically toxic. For example, the refusal to allow top up treatments.
NICE/doctor says “X” is the right protocol. Patient says “but I want Y” as well
At the moment the patient can’t have Y privately without paying *all* of the costs of X. It’s fine to ask them to pay for Y and perhaps a premium (like a corkage fee) but not make it impossible for anyone to afford Y by fully loading the cost (to be clear, I’m referring to approved therapies that NICE doesn’t believe are justified for the NHS not BS jungle juice)
Even insurance CEOs deserve due process @rcs1000