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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Tories need to move the agenda off the NHS if they’re to h
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Tories need to move the agenda off the NHS if they’re to have any chance
I had sort of stopped watching PMQs every week because it is just less interesting and less important. Corbyn is getting a bit better but both he and TMay are pedestrian compared with others that we’ve seen over the years.
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He was bullet proof on the NHS.
We need a performer like this back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb7B9TR-gK0&feature=share
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/pmqs/8955789/David-Cameron-defends-coalition-Its-not-like-were-brothers-Ed.html
People have made up their minds on her, plus the party won’t let her fight another election.
I dislike John Bercow intensely but he’s completely right that the behaviour of MPs at this session looks terrible to the public.
You can be good at winning and PMQs, it’s not an either or.
https://www.ft.com/content/075d679e-0033-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5
She may not have made the £350m per week pledge, but becoming the defacto leader of leave in parliament means she will need to live up to the policy in some manner.
F1: I'd forgotten about this, but rumours of a Force India name change have been around for months. They might still do it, but testing's next month so they'll need to get their skates on.
350mn for NHS by 2022
Abolish Triple Lock and means test WFA.
A review into care funding
Then the Tories would have likely won a very healthy improved majority.
But Mike is right. This is an issue that the Tories need to make disappear. More money in the short term is probably essential. In the medium term (i.e. 3-5 years) the government needs to make an integration of social care and health treatment work. That probably means transferring responsibility from councils to the NHS.
At the same time, the Conservatives need to focus on the absurdities of Corbyn's fantasy economics. Any fool can pick a figure - £350m a week, for example - and say they'll increase NHS spending by that amount. If that were all Labour were saying, it might be hard to counter, but they are also saying they'll spend zillions more on all sorts of dumb things, such as £4.6bn on a purely ideological change to ownership of the Royal Mail, and miraculously add all this extra spending with no tax increases except on the super-rich. A well-crafted attack should concentrate on the line that they are just throwing off spending pledges at random, and they are not credible in aggregate.
But Theresa May is the leader at the moment. We won't get well-crafted attacks. Yet.
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2017/12/29/the-challenges-facing-the-conservatives/
Ahem: or even this - http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2017/11/03/mrs-may-has-missed-an-opportunity-and-it-could-be-costly/
There are ways to cut costs within the NHS, to free up billions of pounds, without putting up taxes or borrowing:
https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/955926242481659904
How much of that would we really get rid of?
NHS Primary Care
NHS Acute Care
NHS Social Care
The needs are very different, both from a patient perspective and a resourcing (capital and human) perspective.
edit: and the services shouldn't necessarily be co-located. I'd look at splitting triage from the acute locations, for example.
https://twitter.com/michaelwhite/status/956190210722811905
An organisation which deals with parking and bin collections does not seem to me to be the obvious organisation for looking after frail elderly people requiring personal social and medical care.
Why shouldn't this be the responsibility of the NHS or a social care bit of it?
https://twitter.com/afneil/status/955816818370899968
https://twitter.com/matthewchampion/status/956148948938428417
And what of the shareholders of companies that provide health products, what should they do with their investment. I understand one major shareholder in such a company is so poor he had to leave the country to reduce his tax bill... considering some of the dirt poor people I know who afford to pay their full tax bill I can't imagine what kind of poverty he may be forced into should his available money supply be made even smaller.
Mr. D, I replied to a post of his about a warm period in Roman Britain.
Mr. Mark, well he *is* a sensible fellow.
As for highlights, I did like the response to my summary of the Lord of the Rings:
https://twitter.com/MorrisF1/status/949332421530529793
Ahem, meant to be working. Will return to it now.
Does the internal market really save enough to cover that and more? I doubt it.
An example: my department provides a specialist service hosted in larger GP practices, so as to provide specialist services closer to home. This is done at a much lower tariff than hospital outpatients, so a win all round. Then the CCG outsourced their properties to a property management company. This company then decided that we must pay room rent. We have no budget for this, and this arm of our service breaks even, with no surplus. Until the new financial year we will lose money on the service, though would make a good surplus if we sent the patients to our overloaded acute Trust outpatients. As such we have submitted for a substantial tariff uplift for next finyear.
The end of this is that we bill the CCG more, so we can pay rent to them. This all creates work for penpushers and bean counters, and adds to churn without benefiting anyone, as we will wind up doing the same things to the same patients in the same places. That is what the internal market does, in a practical example.
Say someone wanted to come and rent that room for a sufficient price that you would be able to fund the work in the acute Trust outpatients plus the CCG would generate a surplus then that might be the most rational thing to do. But unless you had a price then you wouldn't necessarily know that
(edit: and the article estimated the costs ranging between £4.5bn, £10bn and £20bn). So the saving could be a lot less than you are positing)
https://twitter.com/carolinejmolloy/status/955389885845819392
Was angling towards Branson, assuming he is a shareholder in Virgin, they have NHS contracts and he lives somewhere else for tax purposes.
I didn't agree with the £350m for try NHS at the time Leave made the pledge, I don't think it is necessary now, however, we live in a world where a huge proportion of the 17m leave voters were motivated by that figure. No point in denying it. If the party had got behind that and given it credibility by making it the central pledge of the manifesto then we would be sitting on 350-360 seats, the 11 rebels would be of no consequence and the extreme Brexit lot could be safely ignored, and we'd save the £200m per year to the DUP.
The PM is useless at PMQ's and the leader of the opposition is fairly poor in historical terms. Corbyn should be utterly smashing May week in and week out. He scores points but does not have the gravity or the panache to exploit PMQ's and build support in the country.
The Tories are vulnerable on the NHS, however Corbyn just advises more money should be spent on it. I think what he needs to do in terms of drawing blood is identify where political decisions have been made and exploit them remorselessly. He needs May, Hunt and co. to take ownership of the problems the NHS are experiencing and pin the tail to the donkeys in charge. Sadly I don't think Corbyn is capable of this forensic examination.
I maintain the view that we are being governed by a diminished political establishment who really should never have been put in positions of leadership. When I think of Theresa May as PM - I laugh, what a sack of rotten potatoes!
It may be that co-location is the right answer; but if someone is prepared to pay sufficiently more then that needs to be considered. Price is just a mechanism for people to think about value.
The Tories claim rightly that they are increasing NHS funding to its highest ever level, but fail to point out that increases in spending are not keeping up with inflation in healthcare, nor with demand caused by an aging population and new technology. The Tories at heart would prefer private health insurance to replace the NHS.
Labour equally have problems. It is not enough for Labour to claim -wrongly -that the Tories cut the NHS. They dont.Labour is ideologically wed to the Bevanite 1948 NHS even though it was never designed to cope with modern costs and demand. Corbyn bangs on about not enough funding, but fails to explain where he would find sufficient funding other than to spend over and over again the extra taxes on the rich which he has already spent on abolishing student tuition fees, and higher public sector pay. Crucially he has said that no one except the rich will pay higher taxes -and therefore he too will not have enough money to properly fund the NHS.
Time for both parties to be honest and think radically. Yes the NHS needs to be (mostly free at the point of use. American style private insurance is unacceptable. But people need to pay higher taxes to fund it Everyone needs to pay higher taxes. The NHS creaks on while Sweden and France are recognised as having much better systems.
https://twitter.com/GuidoFawkes/status/956199604743229441
I’m assuming Mrs May made/received the call there.
The Tories will be shown the door if they go down the route of private health care. Toxic!
Involving the private sector does not mean that the government is not an important stakeholder.
Government financing (free at the point of need) is not the same as government provision (employing every doctor and nurse)
As for "I cannot see how profit making companies can offer health care cheaper than the NHS", presumably you must think the same applies to airlines, supermarkets, computer suppliers, car manufacturers, lawyers, and every other supplier of any goods or services. Or perhaps not - the reason why profit making companies are more efficient than nationalised industries is not a mystery, it's completely understood: they have a direct incentive to be so.
And you ignored my point about other countries.
Public bodies require Companies to be successful to generate employment and profits with which the public sector derives it's income. Demonising the private sector will only result in a diminished public sector
Try actually learning something about the subject before commenting on it and you would save everyone a lot of time.
The "price" in a free market, is a piece of information that helps with that allocation process.
Personally, I would attract many more of the super-rich to the UK, and have the (fair) taxes they then pay used to give us a world-beating NHS. Unfortunately, we have an Oppositon party that seems hell-bent on getting rid of the wealthy we already have. Love 'em or hate 'em, these are the people that fund our NHS right now. The top 1% pay 27% of all Income Tax. Their loss to the Exchequer under Corbyn would be cataclysmic for the provision of health care. Either that, or Joe and Julie Avergae are going to get stung for thousands more in tax. Guess which.....