Diesel

Just watched it - he could not have BEEN more evasive on todays Labour **** up of proclaiming that the Tories WILL charge people for NHS operations. In fact they wont [and he knew it] but just sat there and wriggled and squirmed and 'span' till the interviewer gave up.

One of his evasive answers said 'the Tories will subsidise half the cost of private operations with NHS money...tell me if I'm wrong'. Well YES Tony you ARE wrong (which the ITN guy missed). Misrepresenting/lying again - the Tories will give you HALF the cost of a NHS operation (NOT a private one) towards having it done privately. BIG difference as NHS op's are already half the cost of private. This means the NHS get to keep half the cost of an NHS operation for doing....nothing! Labour currently spend millions on the private sector ops already as the NHS cant cope - Tory policy seems cleverer?

SiDHEaD

Genuine question: What effect would this have on such things as waiting lists, if less going private??

Diesel

Less people going private is a bad thing (from a socialist perspective) as it increases burden on NHS. People going private are effectively paying twice which is good (from a socialist perspective) . Giving them 1/2 the NHS cost would seem to encourage more to go private and thus reduce waiting lists for half the true cost of doing the same and treating them???

Unsure really - this was about T Bliar's true colurs on public display

OllyK

consider:
1) there is currently a pretty static number of doctors
2) doctors have to train for many years, so an over night increase is unlikely
3) many doctors (surgeons) work in both private and NHS hospitals

I should think it will make little difference, but it will save money. This may then allow re-investment in the NHS in the long term to train more doctors. It's part of how you can get more (or at least the same) AND reduce the costs.

Iain Young

I'm not sure if actually will save any money. On the upside (for example), they contribute half of the operation cost and the patient contributes the other half. This means that the operation only costs the NHS half of what it would if they had done the job themselves.

On the other side, people who were purely going private before, will now be able to claim half of their costs from the NHS, and so there will be outgoings which were not there before.

At the end of the day, I doubt it will make much difference....

Chip

I seem to remember that recently Blair and his croniew keep on telling us about a thing called choice. Seems its OK to give the people a choice only when it suits them to ie Toll roads.

The Tory scheme will obviously take some of the load off the NHS therefore bringing down waiting lists, costs etc. Simple really!


Chip

Dream Weaver

Its not strictly half and half, you just pay the difference, so if a private op is £5000, and a NHS op is £2500 you just get 50% of the NHS op knocked off the private op, so you get £5000 - £1250, so you end up paying £3750, and the NHS have only had to fork out half of what they would have paid normally.

jasey

Privatise the NHS and be done with it. Give us all our tax money back and let us take out private medical Insurance.

For those that don't want to insure themselves will die and the UK will become great again !

Everbody will be happy !

Iain Young

Why is that obvious?

The same surgeons perform the operations, for both private and the NHS, so if there are more private operations happening, there will be less surgeons available for NHS operations. Unless the Tories are going to magically conjour up a load of new surgeons from somehwhere that is?

Also as said in my previous post, the NHS will have to shoulder some of the cost of private operations which are currently paid for fully by the patient. And so although they will be saving money on some, they will be spending more on others. I guess at the end of the day, it won't make much difference.

Iain Young

Welcome to America

jasey

Don't know why Tony doesn't think it's a good Idea too

OllyK

The only other factor I can think of, I suspect that "most" people going privately are doing so through a health insurance scheme rather than paying themselves. So will there be that many actually taking up the scheme anyway? I suppose this does allow people without health insurance to consider going privately that may not have been able to afford it before. Dunno - just a thought.

Iain Young

That's true. There's still only the same number of doctors / surgeons though...

OllyK

I said that earlier - I also said it wouldn't affect waiting lists, it "may" however reduce costs on the NHS, that was my reasoning behind that.

Cyberevo

iTrader: (1)

My understanding is that if you pay out of your own pocket (not bupa etc) for a private opp then this is carried out at hospital anyway but you just jump the queue, so how will it bring down waiting lists as there are only 24 hours in a day, are they going up open up more hospitals?

Chip

Well, take for instance the scenario of 5 people going into the NHS to have an op at a cost of £5000 each. That's £25000

Under the Conservatives plan maybe 2 of these 5 will opt to get their operation carried out a a little sooner in a private hospital.

So the NHS carries out the 3 remaining ops at a cost of £15000 and hands over £5000 to fund 50% of the other 2 operations giving a total cost to the NHS of £20000 therefore saving itself £5000 as well as getting an extra 2 off their long waiting list for doing very little.

A winner all round if you ask me

Chip

King RA

"The NHS employs 1.3 million staff, is the third largest employer in the world and the largest employer of women in Europe".

---Thats gonna cost a few quid now. Scrap the damned thing and be done with it.

I work with a guy that must go to the doctors once every 2 weeks, christ I'm lucky (or unlucky) if I go once every 4 years. He and loads of other wasters would think twice about wasting doctors time and our money if they had to pay. Private health is much more efficient because they only treat ill people.

I was in the doctors and a women came in and said she had a cold could she see the doctor. I'm so glad they said go and buy some cough medicine. Loosers.

Abdabz

The labour parties proclamations relating to Tories charging for health care in the manner they have recently is slanderous / libellous...
I've read the manifesto and had it explained to me on the radio and even I managed to understand it... There needs to be tighter legisliation around what can and cannot be used to bolster a parties election campaign....

Iain Young

It's no worse than the Tories have been doing to Labour though. For example, the statistics they are quoting about violent crime having risen. What they fail to mention is that the classification of these crimes were expanded greatly after the last election, and so a lot more crimes can now be dealt with as violent. Watched panorama the other night and the chief constanble blokey reckoned that if the classifications hadn't been changed, then the figures would show a reduction of a significant margin (as well as crime overall)...

Both as bad as each other in my book. Just preying on peoples fears with carefully worded soundbites rather than properly debating policy....

Diesel

Yes! Why dont I get that? Supossedly the NHS is way overstretched and hospital doctors do 72hr weeks (disgraceful). YET surgeon 'demi gods' on 72K have time for golf and private patients and... patient waiting lists... In any other industry it would be called 'moonlighting' or 'half-hearted' and is potentially a sackable offence in my book/industry!!!

Time for a commercialy biased re-think - its all industry after all...

D
}

dba

This Tory policy is utter bollocks,like pretty much every other bandwagon they jump on

dsmith

Ahh yes - New Labour - never jumped on a bandwagon in its life.......

dsmith

If you were to force surgeons to work exclusively for the NHS - they wouldnt. They wouldnt earn enough. If you paid them the equivalent of their combined private/nhs earnings now ytoud cost the NHS more.

Listend to John Ried on R4 this evening. "Tories will take money out of the NHS to pay for private operations" - But John, isnt that exactly what labour are also proposing ? "Thats different we're buying them in bulk from the private sector". LOL. Nothning like a politicians logic.

dsmith

Also Blair on Paxman

"to suggest Government knows what business will need is ridiculous" (Whilst evading questions on numbers of economic migrants needed).

So there we have it - A labout governemnet accepts it is nonsense to make any attempt at identifying whats business needs.

FlexiRob

Atleast if they did this it would stop all these imigrants coming here for free health care , taking up vital resources for honest hard working tax paying people

Iain Young

Actually if you watched the Paxman interview, he was just trying to make the point that you should not place a quota on immigrant workers in the same way that the tories are proposing because it will actually hurt business. No government can know exactly what the staffing requirements are for every company in the country, and so the immigrant worker laws have to be flexible enough to account for this. Simple point very intelligently made by Blair I thought.

Btw, I'm not a Labour fan, but I thought that in the interview Paxman came across as a very bigoted, biased, arrogant, rude, and frankly unintelligent person. I've no idea how Blair kept his cool with all those childish questions which had very little to do with the forthcoming election or Labour policies.

Be interesting to see how he deals with Howard on Friday....

Iain Young

What he was saying that immigrant workers would be controlled, but would be based on what is needed by the economy in general rather than just blindly handing out work permits to whoever asks for them, (i.e. permits handed out to people requested by companies, rather than just handing them out to people blindly looking for work).

Sounds perfectly sensible to me. That way, if a company wants to bring a load of it's workers over from the usa for 6 months to work on a project for example, they can. Under the tory plans, it's possible that they could not if the quotas have already been met. It simply does not make sense just to apply quotas and think this it will solve the problems.

We may have 1 million unemployed, but that does not mean that they have the skills, or even the intelligence to fill the demands of the country.

True. The tories started that rot in the schools, and Labour has done little to improve the situation.

Yep sick making stuff, although the tories one was just as cringeworthy and full of half truths...

Petem95

Anyone see BLiar on Newnight with Paxman tonight?!!!! Fantastic watching him sit there squirming, totally spinning all the questions!!!!