OK, I'll ask. When you had a tumour removed from your back, did you use the healthcare already being paid for by your employer, or did you rely upon an overstretched NHS to do that?
OK, I guess. It's not like you can ask your employer to stop paying the tax deductible private healthcare insurance premiums on your behalf, is it?
2009/10 .....£99.8 bn 2010/11 .....£102 bn 2011/12 .....£104.3 bn 2012/13 .....£108.9 bn 2013/14 .....£109.7 bn
The NHS is a political hot potato and a sacred cow all rolled into one. Its a fiscal bottomless pit riddled with inefficiencies, bureaucracy and waste, mis-management and political interference, but no-one can reform it because for no obvious evidence-based reason it is revered and idealised to the point of religious fervour. Lots of people say their lives have been saved by the NHS. What they really mean is their lives have been saved by modern surgery. The NHS is just one way of delivering it. And not a very good way. No country in the world is rushing to copy our system of healthcare, yet we persist in the delusion that this decrepit relic of the 1950's is the envy of the world. We wrap it in cultural cotton wool, dope it to the eyeballs with gargantuan sums of borrowed money and scream treason at anyone who dares to suggest the blindingly obvious fact that the system is failing on every level. It won't get any better any time soon.
Private hospitals provide a service that is convenient & mostly very good for non-life threatening surgical needs. Orthopaedic operations & ophthalmology procedures such as cataracts are good examples. However, very few private hospitals will touch severe trauma or intensive care regimes. They are very costly & require high levels of expertise that private hospitals couldn't justify on a cost per use basis. For this reason the vast majority of them ship out seriously ill patients to NHS hospitals. No private hospital has their own ITU or CCU equipped & staffed to the standards of those operated by university teaching hospitals. When private hospitals ship out patients to the NHS for emergency or end of life care, neither the private hospital nor the patient pays the NHS a penny. Many NHS trauma consultants & anaesthetists are also members (usually as reservists) of the armed forces. It is a sad fact that the experiences learnt in overseas conflicts have driven developments in trauma care to the extent that the NHS major trauma centres lead the world in the efficacy of treatment. This is now something that everyone in need of trauma care can benefit from. Every time I work at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, I reflect on the many MOD staff I see there. Many of them are amputees who have paid a heavy price for their service & may not be here without the skills provided by the NHS. Indeed, it is the combined services of the MOD & the NHS that helps to guide these men & women back to a position where they may contribute & maintain their self respect. I'm all for keeping the politics out of the NHS, but people should remember what a diverse asset the NHS is. Few of us (myself included, and I've worked in healthcare for over 37 years) appreciate just how many services are provided by the NHS.
I think you'll find that the private healthcare premiums are not "tax deductible". My employer offers private healthcare as an option, and I believe that the price is considerably less than it would be on the open market (some sort of bulk buying effect, and an averaging of premiums across age ranges - meaning that the price starts to look attractive to the older employees).... BUT, and it's a big but, this is a TAXABLE benefit whether I take it as cash/salary, or in the form of the insurance (I have done both at various times). Another important point is that, in the UK, health insurance is only a top-up - it still requires everything to be arranged through GPs and has lots of exclusions, as Mariella Frostrup has been publicising.
No political party will put forward any sensible or cost-effective proposals for NHS reform over the coming months. A simple and affordable way to deal with the current £2 billion (per year) apparently urgent requirement would be to bite the bullet and to introduce charges (I suggest £10) for GP appointments (the money to be passed to the NHS, not to the GPs themselves). At a stroke, this would: - Bring in quite a lot more than £2bn per year (I think that the average person has 5+ appointments per year!) - Reduce demand (but £10 is not going to put you off if you really need to see a doctor) and reduce missed appointments - Recoup at least some money from "healthcare tourists" to the extent that they exist - Start to bring the NHS into the 21st century (virtually no other country operates a system where you pay nothing) Even with the NHS track record for wasting money on admin/IT, it should be possible to use a little of that extra revenue to put in simple systems to apply charging (my dentist has no problem with this). There is no need to compare such a regime with the USA - we only need to look across the channel, and healthcare outcomes, for all, are generally better in much of Europe. For the genuinely poor or those with chronic conditions, some exemptions could be applied (although in most cases, some sort of "season ticket" with a cap of maybe £100 per year would suffice). Of course this won't be proposed by any political party, because the NHS is indeed a political football, if not a religion to the British.
We have BUPA at work. I cancelled mine. Its a taxable benefit and I am against it in principle. The NHS is a wonderful thing, even though it has its faults. Try the US system some time. It bankrupted my father twice. Once with a quadruple heart bypass, his fault. Too much wine and red meat. The next with ALS a motor neuron disease which eventually took his life. 24/7 personal healthcare costs and it left my step mother pennyless after his passing. Had to sell house and everything. Health insewerance will only go so far and the weasel clauses written into them need careful reading.
You were clear enough though. It's only "tax deductible" in the same sense as the rest of an employee's salary is, i.e. it is part of the employers overall business costs, before profit - but there is still NI for the employer to pay (on both regular salary and medical insurance, if provided).
"Reform"! The NHS has been reformed and reformed over and over again. It has been torn up by the roots and reformed nearly to death, repeatedly. If there is one thing the NHS does not need, it is to be "reformed" yet again now. Allowing it a few years to settle would be more beneficial than almost anything else.
i am of the opinion some form of charging should be introduced, i wouldnt have a prob with it. dont think there should be automatic free prescriptions up here also.
I disagree, all health and medical should be free for everyone. No exceptions. But I would also like to see the basic staples of food provided free of charge to all who need it. Also water.
Reminds me of the Labour politician some years back who said "no one should earn less than the average wage", unfortunately I can't remember who it was.
