The NHS

[ob]

Father in law aged 90 rushed in to A&E on Sunday. Breathless, confused, high temperature. Lay on trolley for 48 hours before found a bed. Turns out he has a urine infection

 

[metalblue]

My wife works for NHS and she’s complaining about how much things cost due to the PFI rules, all brought in by Blair and one of the worst things to happen to the public sector, new laptop £500 PC world, no mate £1500 through this supplier. Wooden tongue depressor 1p nah they are £1 from this catalogue, absolute licence to print money.

PFI is a nightmare for trusts and a scandal for government but as both have their finger prints on the body it’ll get paid off and disappear from their collective memory.

Maintenance was part of the deal, both hard and soft, and that was then outsourced again to the likes of serco who charge the proverbial £100 to change a lightbulb.

 

[metalblue]

Father in law aged 90 rushed in to A&E on Sunday. Breathless, confused, high temperature. Lay on trolley for 48 hours before found a bed. Turns out he has a urine infection

Hope he on the mend mate. Sounds like a horrible experience, maybe write to the PALS team?

 

[ob]

Hope he on the mend mate. Sounds like a horrible experience, maybe write to the PALS team?

Cheers mate, yea we will. Both me and his daughter used to work in hospital so know some of the staff. For quite a few hours on first night he was in a corridor near some kind of system where they send off blood samples in container along a pipe. He got no sleep at all.

 

[metalblue]

Cheers mate, yea we will. Both me and his daughter used to work in hospital so know some of the staff. For quite a few hours on first night he was in a corridor near some kind of system where they send off blood samples in container along a pipe. He got no sleep at all.

I know the thing you mean mate. It’s not great for anyone is it? Your FIL, the staff, or yourselves the family.

No quick solutions either which is the sad bit.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

PFI was brought in by the Major government. At the time, there was an obsession with the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. There was a taboo against it going above such-and-such a percent, though like many taboos that government obsess over, it was mainly bollocks.

PFI was a way of getting around this as expenditure did not count against PSBR. So you could have your new hospital/school/police station/whatever. It also involved the highly efficient private sector in the story, which was seen as a Good Thing.

I remember agreeing with my mate, at the time, that this was like buying a car on a credit card. That it would be ludicrously expensive. That it was obviously more sensible for the government just to borrow the money, given that it can borrow more cheaply than anyone else.

(Sigh). But the obsession with the PSBR plus the desire to have new shiny things (which was justified after years of neglect) meant that this PFI nonsense went ahead.

You will notice no one mentions the PSBR anymore. Fuck knows what it is now. But it's all of a piece with similar obsessions with the balance of payments, M3 money supply, and the value of the £ against 'a basket of foreign currencies'. All of which used to be on the TV every night, none of which have been mentioned in years. (I wouldn't even know where to look for the M3 figure these days, but they used to talk about it as if civilisation itself hung on its level.)

Sounds similar to student loans. We can carry on funding students by borrowing huge amounts of money, but all of the debt is on the students' accounts, so it's technically 'privately held' and so doesn't show up as public debt. Except for the fact that the government are liable to pay it off after 30 years.

 

[inbetween]

Sounds similar to student loans. We can carry on funding students by borrowing huge amounts of money, but all of the debt is on the students' accounts, so it's technically 'privately held' and so doesn't show up as public debt. Except for the fact that the government are liable to pay it off after 30 years.

I laughed at mine recently. I owe something like £27k. I pay £165 per month through PAYE but the annual interest on the total balance on my most recent statement is 6.25%, £135pm!

So because of the interest I'm actually only paying off about £30pm off the balance. I'll probably never pay even half of it off and then it'll get written off. I earn a decent salary so I doubt many will pay any major part of it off.

And every year they're loaning the next lot even more, it's a ticking timebomb!

 

[I'm With Stupid]

I laughed at mine recently. I owe something like £27k. I pay £165 per month through PAYE but the annual interest on the total balance on my most recent statement is 6.25%, £135pm!

So because of the interest I'm actually only paying off about £30pm off the balance. I'll probably never pay even half of it off and then it'll get written off. I earn a decent salary so I doubt many will pay any major part of it off.

And every year they're loaning the next lot even more, it's a ticking timebomb!

It's one thing to refuse to pay for students' tuition fees and make them take out a loan to pay for it, but it's sickening for the government to then actually try to profit off them.

I just put yours through a loan repayment calculator. 27 grand at 6.25% APR. I guess you haven't just started paying it back, but assuming you had, it came out with £165 per month taking exactly 30 years and 8 months to pay off. This is obviously assuming that you're not getting a raise in 30 years, which is pretty unrealistic. But in the 30 years you're making repayments, the government will have profited a further £33,700 off you, and you will have paid back over 60 grand.

There's basically a bunch of people in the sweet spot for the government to rip off. People with huge salaries will actually pay it off quickly enough to not have to pay huge interest, and people with low salaries will basically just never pay it off and spend their entire life paying a piddling amount. Then there's the people in the middle who will never earn enough to pay it off completely, but will earn enough to end up paying huge amounts of interest on it for the full 30 years and actually pay back far more than they initially bothered even accounting for inflation, and it seems like the government are basically using this profit to counteract the people who can't afford to pay it off. Which is a ballsy move, but one that's far enough in the future that no-one has really noticed it too much yet.

 

[BrianW]

What people don't want to admit is that modern government in a (relatively) advanced country is a complex and very, very expensive thing.

The underlying problem is that this country is not as wealthy, relatively, as people think it is. We may be in the top 6 or 7 for GDP, but per capita it's more like 27th, which doesn't sound so good, does it? Take away London, which generates a shit load of wealth, and we are quite poor. In addition, the wealth gap is exceptionally high by European standards.

The solution is to boost our national income. The great question is - how? Brexit has damaged our trade (so has Covid and Ukraine, but that's outside our control.) It's tempting just to say - we are fucked.

This is why I am giving this government a fair bit of slack. They have a lot to put right, and not a lot of tax income to do it. What's the alternative? Cut taxes and slash services? Not really on, is it? Not with a growing proportion of old folk needing NHS and care services. Not unless you bring in compulsory euthanasia.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

The underlying problem is that this country is not as wealthy, relatively, as people think it is. We may be in the top 6 or 7 for GDP, but per capita it's more like 27th, which doesn't sound so good, does it? Take away London, which generates a shit load of wealth, and we are quite poor. In addition, the wealth gap is exceptionally high by European standards.

Yep, I watched something a while back that said that if you take away London, the UK has roughly the same per capita GDP as Mississippi, which is the poorest American state.