On Feb 4, 2:16*am, Steve Walker -
family.me.uk wrote:
On 03/02/2012 16:56, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:





In , charles
*wrote:
In , Dave Plowman (News)
* * *wrote:
In article4f2c0467.141281750@localhost, Cynic
* * *wrote:
I see two perfectly reasonable solutions. *The first is as I
mentioned - friends and relatives who do not work step in and help.
The second is for you to take out insurance to cover the possibility
that you will have to give up work due to your own or someone else's
disability.

Surely that's what NI does? And without a private company making a
profit?

No, that's what NI was supposed to do. *It also seems to make a loss for
the state (ie taxpayer)

So would you privatize it while making it compulsory? The snag with
voluntary schemes is many will just take the risk it won't happen to them.
Look at what is happening to pensions in the UK now so many employers have
pulled out of providing them without choice to their employees.

You don't have to take the risk to get caught out. I had insurances that
paid most of my commitments, but they generally only last one year (and
even that is very expensive) - our wonderful NHS bounced my wife around
various consultants and tests, with long waits for each, for two and a
half years before they diagnosed her condition. Total time being seen or
tested during that time, less than a day, discounting waiting. Along the
way, one consultant stated that he didn't know what the problem was, but
could take away the symptoms - he "offered" and then pushed for my wife
to let him permanently blind her in her left eye! In the end it turned
out to be a problem that could be alleviated with medication.

Two things would have saved my employment - a more flexible employer
(working reduced hours for reduced pay, but at least still working or
very flexible hours) or the NHS seeing people in a reasonable time
(measured from GP referral to diagnosis, rather than separate times for
each re-referral).

My wife happens to work in the NHS and I know that she has referred
patients for treatments that will sort their problems out, only for the
budget committee to decide to send them for a cheaper option, that they
know will not work, but will push the problem out of this year's budget!
These are mental health patients, with severe conditions and by
extending their illnesses in this way, they and their families are badly
damaged and the total cost to the economy is increased ... but that's
from "different" pots, so doesn't matter!

This is the logic of "efficiency savings", where on every formal
accounting measure, the NHS has spent less money and the government
has 'proved' the existence of 'layabout public sector workers' who
have now been forced to 'put a full day's work in'.

In reality, what has happened is that service users are forced to put
a full day's work into hurdling the additional bureaucracy and
inflexibility created by the new 'efficiency', whereas previously they
did not have to do so.

Then users suddenly realise just how really inefficient the system has
become, so the rich go off and pay for private healthcare (where they
pay only for themselves and not for others through progressive
taxation, and magically the service also seems so much better because
it is not under the political pressure of an oppressive 'efficiency
drive'), whilst the poor (especially those who think of themselves as
"middle-earners") vote for even more 'efficiency savings' that will
further erode the public services that they enjoy and which they can
not afford to pay for privately, and which were previously paid for
not wholly from their own tax payments, but by taxing the rich
progressively.

In the meantime, reductions in taxes on earnings, will allow the
market to drive down earnings further so that, ceretis paribus, most
employees end up taking home the same pay as they did under a 'high-
tax' regime, but whilst also gradually and imperceptibly forfeiting
the efficient and effective public services that they once used to
enjoy and which they did not need to pay for out of their take-home
pay.

As for the effect of this poor-quality treatment of the sick, perhaps
after a decade or two, there will be a massive inflation in the number
of patients requiring treatment with 'increasingly complex needs', but
it is unlikely that the link will be made to a lack of better
preventative treatment decades earlier, and anyway the increased cost
might be used to justify further assaults on the system and lend
weight to the argument that the service "is simply unaffordable" given
the "sheer proliferation of demands made and increasingly complex and
costly treatments" (which are in fact necessary to remedy the lack of
effective treatment at the earlier stage).

The same is true of education and social security, where cuts in
income (both in-work and out-of-work) at the bottom made from the 80s
onwards, have led to an increasing number of 'feckless families' whose
physical, mental, and moral degeneracy (viewed from teh dominant
culture) the state then has to compensate for with massive (and
inefficiently belated) interventions across many agencies
(particularly with poorly socialised children), that are more costly
in the end than the savings that were originally made.

If I remember correctly, it costs the state a couple of grand a year
to educate the average child from a decent family, and that child will
come out of it at the end with a reasonable standard of education. It
costs tens of thousands of pounds to manage a poorly socialised child
within the education system, and even despite that level of spending
at the end they will have derived few if any useful skills from the
process (although warehousing them in a school, may well have been
prevented from developing even more antisocial behaviours if left to
wander the streets).