(09-15-2018 01:52 PM)Contagion Wrote: I don't know how it is over in the UK, but here in the US it's a mess.
It's bad and it's only getting worse. The state health service was set up by the left and like pensions was not set up in a sustainable way.
If you want to give everyone health care IMO the only way to do it
would have been to have everyone pay into a fund as soon as they start working at a rate of about £1,000 or $1,300 per year. That would give you $300,000 over a working lifetime, which is less than the $240,000 spent per person per lifetime.
However, doing so would have required a grace period where there was no health care while the fund built up.
Since its inception the amount spent on the NHS has increased by about 1000% in real (infaltion adjusted terms).
It's now not possible to set up a sustainable system without first getting rid of the NHS.
The UK will continue to spend more and more on healthcare due to the aging population, new treatments and foreigners coming in to steal healthcare and then go home. In the case of the later I saw a report suggesting 2% of the NHS budget is now spent on such foreigners.
With the soaring costs is also coming worse treatment. Waiting lists are getting longer and longer and nothing will ever be done about it. The only solution is to make the economy smaller by increasing taxes to pay for more health care.
My estimate is that there needs to be 1.2% economic growth every year which would be completely taxed just to keep the NHS and pensions papered over. And that will likely increase with the aging population. But over the last decade the economy has shrunk and real wages gone down.
On the current trajectory by about 2060 the UK will be need to spend 65% of GDP just to pay for pensions and the NHS. Right now it spends 43%. Cuba is the only country spending 65% or more.
Returning to the quality. Increasingly people are having to go private to get a diagnosis and then take it to the NHS to get on a waiting list for treatment. The NHS is rationed. They don't have the resources required. So the method is to try and bump anyone off who has an unobvious ailment. You have to be forceful and keep going back if you want anything done.
My aunt and uncle know someone who died of cancer because the NHS essentially refused to look at him. Anything like this is more common.
My mother and her sisters had some specialist convince them not to treat their 90+ old mother because she was too old. She died.
At the same time my mother was having a multi-year battle trying to get a diagnosis, but the best she got was being told she was mentally ill and stuck on anti-depressants. She got a diagnosis within 15 minutes of going private. She's dead.
Previously my life was ruined for years as they refused to diagnose me. When they did they misdiagnosed me.
This is all pretty standard.
With America, I believe the reason healthcare is so expensive is because it's subject to regulatory capture. There would be cheaper options, but they are not allowed to exist.
The UK is doomed as far as healthcare is concerned. The US on the other hand, you could set up a fund that everyone has to pay into and make some changes to reduce costs.
But you could only sustainably treat the generation that has fully paid in. And it couldn't ever be entrusted to the Democrats, because they'd just do the same as they've done with pensions - get people dependent and set up a system which will drag the country down before collapsing while giving fat $300,000 pensions to state employees who never paid in remotely enough needed to net such pensions.