Boris and funding the NHS...

I find the hypothesis in the opening line way off the mark. This is the biggest economic shock in living memory, allied to an unprecedented health crisis. Sentiment will be with supporting public health in the short term of course but we'll be super lucky to get back to any kind of normality any time soon, never mind repairing wholesale underlying structural issues in the health service. The government is literally paying the wages of millions of employed and self employed people, hundreds of thousands will still be living hand to mouth. It's likely that taxes will need to be raised after a recovery just to stop us as a nation from being bankrupt.

All you ever hear is that the NHS is underfunded.
It currently costs £130 billion a year, that's £2,000 a year for everyone in the country.
Most people have to work to a budget of what they can afford with out constantly asking for a pay rise, that's normal.
As for throwing money at it, who could you trust to spend it wisely ?, i know i can't.

Yes it's really important I feel to get past the rhetoric. As this crisis has highlighted, the primary issues that the NHS had and has isn't lack of funding.

Before the NHS is given any funding increase they need to publicise the spending of every penny.  We all know what happens; the NHS wishes to purchase a product and the price suddenly triples.  Make it clear exactly how much the NHS are paying for things in order to stop companies ripping them off.  Otherwise any extra funding is just money down the toilet.  Who knows, perhaps if we can get their purchases down to a realistic price we might find they're receiving enough funding already.

Under Boris the NHS was already getting its highest amount in history.

At the moment up and down the country hospitals, doctors surgeries and other treatment centres sit empty and staff underused.

If we are in lockdown for months all those missed treatments and appointments will have to be met.

It will cost billions more.

OK, interesting replies.

It must be said that the NHS will never have enough money. Such a complex organisation offering so many services to so many will always need huge amounts of cash. But what is the alternative? Have private health insurance where compaines offering it will always require their profit first?

I do agree with the poster about how the price of so many things the NHS needs is inflated by suppliers and I would not dispute that this needs some very urgent attention. I also agree that the administration of extra NHS money would need to be very carefully managed - as per my original post.

As for the economic problems caused by this virus, well don't be quite so hasty to think the problems are insurmountable. They are not.

The world recovered from the 1930's depression although that took time. But the best example of a bounce back is World War 2.

Study that to any degree and you will soon see that six years of total conflict cost far more than this virus will. It was six years of destruction to everything, people, property, infrastructure, culture, the bl**dy lot went up in smoke.

Yet we got out of it. So far, the cost of this virus has been tiny compared to 1939-1945.

Lastly, we may not have seen the end game with this virus yet.

If the governments of the world start to realise that the price of saving millions of lives now will be the cost of many millions of lives more in the future, don't be surprised if the virus is allowed to let rip and herd immunity seen as the solution - at least until a vaccine comes along. I suspect Trump - possibly out of ignorance rather than thinking about it deeply - already has this view. He will not be alone as time goes on without a solution.

Wrecked economies will mean wrecked health services in the future - and that is why this current course of action, although totally understandable, may not be the final course embarked upon.

Wrecked economies is an interesting term, suggesting that the economy (whatever that is) will be destroyed or severely damaged.
If we take a measure such as GDP, then yes, the figures post virus will paint a picture that can and will be described as wrecked.

But is GDP a metric by which the economy should be measured ?

As for health spending, the comment that the NHS will never have enough money has a certain ring of validity to it.

Advances in medical science, combined with the development of new pharmaceuticals, will invariably ensure that a strong case can be made for the NHS receiving a larger and larger slice of the cake.

But how much of that budget is spent providing treatment for man-made ailments ?

There was a recent thread on the forum that suggested there should / will be a reset button pressed in many areas of our daily lives, both economic and non-economic.

There is certainly a case for pausing and reflecting on how we conduct ourselves, with a view to altering our behaviours for a more sustainable and equitable future.

There are two fundamentally opposed things going on at the moment, people saying the economy doesn't really matter and everything should be done to stop anyone dying for as long as it takes, (and anyone who says the economy matters is an uncaring scumbag who is a murderer), and the same people demanding the economy that is being destroyed should ramp up spending for the NHS. If the state income pie is going down and down by drastic amounts, and you are asking for a bigger amount of this income pie in absolute terms (never mind share of pie), this is going to end badly.

The economic problems are not insurmountable eventually but the point is that they will now be the priority. The existing problems of the NHS would be a big enough challenge in times of economic prosperity, nevermind when we're experiencing a double digit decline in GDP.

At the moment (up until the shut down) there's no jeopardy in the way people choose to act. They go out, drink to oblivion, and expect some else to pick up the pieces, They ride a motorbike, and expect the NHS to put them back together again after a smash. They smoke 40 a day for twenty years and expect to get tens of thousands of pounds worth of the latest cancer treatment.

Too much effort and resources are invested into keeping people alive who have an extremely poor prognosis and quality of life.

Which brings us round to the subject of education.

exactly

Insurance already has IPT but I would be happy to see a HPT incorporated. So the cost of healthcare stemming from peoples car and motorbike accidents is directly covered by their insurance premiums.

It would price most people out of riding a motorbike, and rightly so.

You'll find the cost of smokers is already factored in. Tobacco is taxed heavily and a smoker won't live so long so reducing pension payments.
Drivers are already heavily taxed by the prices at the pumps and road fund license. Only a small fraction of the money raised is spent on roads, the rest just disappears in a black hole.
Drinkers are also subjected to vat and duty which must go some way to covering their health costs.
So who's the next scapegoat, the obese maybe ?, compulsory gastrics bands anyone ?.

I'm arguing that the hpt is commensurate with the risk. Are you arguing that fuel duty and ipt paid by motorcyclists matches the cost of their NHS care required after an accident? That includes life changing care sadly, which reaches into the millions.

https://www.racfoundation.org/data/road-user-taxation-highways-spending-data-chart

I'm not singling out motorcyclists just using all road users.
Have a look at the link and you'll see what i mean about the black hole that £25 billion disappears into annually.

Isn't that just public expenditure on roads? Not ambulances, police, fire service or healthcare after an rta.

Don't you think £25 billion would cover those costs ?.
You could also add in vat on cars and insurance tax if that isn't enough.
I could also mention that council tax includes money that goes to Fire Brigade and Police.

i don't, but the strategy underpinning my suggestion is to help prevent the accident (therefore the demand) in the first place. Instead of simply throwing more and more resources at the demand, we need to tackle the demand.

It would price most people out of riding a motorbike, and rightly so. cider

I had a motorcycle when I was young nothing beats riding them...I would still have, but don't have anywhere to put it

That is the trouble with the world today, men are turning into women. becoming too risk adverse

and if Covis-19 it going to get us what us the point?

Cider
If you took that view to the nth degree, we might as well all be dead.
Would certainly be better than dying of boredom.

the right wing Brexit knucklegraggers must be shoiting themselves that doris has come out of hospital a bigger leftie,liberal than when he went in,which was far to big for the knuckledraggers