The Labour Party may be totally ineffective against the Conservatives but it still has assets and none greater than the Junior Doctors in the NHS. The BBC has gleefully been pushing their narrative that the “evil” Jeremy Hunt is slashing their wages and making things dangerous to patients. As you will know, the reverse is true. Junior Doctors are in the top 10% of earners in the UL, they have been offered a double digit base salary increase so long as they accept a reduction in the dangerous and vast overtime hours they work. Their union, the BMA, rejects this and so a strike now looms.
I am sure you will have seen this story also…
“The actors that play the doctors in Holby City have offered their full support in the row over new contracts for medics. Several big names from the BBC hospital drama have already spoken out in support of action including Rosie Marcel, who has played the surgeon Jac Naylor since 2005.”
It was Von Clausewitz who observed that “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means” My contention that the NHS is Labour by other means and the BBC knows exactly what it is doing. The NHS is vast bloated monolith and far too many within it are Labour partisans. They are quite happy to emotionally blackmail us with the withdrawal of their services and the BBC is happy to assist.
Talking of underfunding of the NHS. I’ll tell you what is underfunded.
The £284bn pension liability, that’s what.
Which went up by £37bn in 2013 alone, according to the hard-to-find, never ever publicised figures.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/246778/0045.pdf para4.5, page 11.
Suggest this is read only in a sitting down position.
Funny how that gets missed off all the tables about comparisons of NHS funding with other countries.
But with the bBBC’s record for million pound pay-offs and general largesse at our expense, any concern for the poor taxpayer is going to get no airtime at all.
Sluff. The NHS Pension scheme has no assets whatsoever and the pensioners are paid direct from the tax payer. There is no pot.
Since the new pensions freedom rules it is now simply not allowed to transfer out of the NHS scheme and transfer the transfer value to another scheme.
I would like to see the outcome of the first test case on this.
Rob. Yes I know. I should have said ‘unfunded’ liability. Point is it is a bill which has to be paid, it is in effect deferred remuneration, and private companies have to include pension payments/liabilities/ surplus/deficits in their accounts and this goes in to their overall Profit/Loss and Balance Sheet. In this example I cannot for the life of me see how the actual annual NHS pension payouts are attached to the annual NHS budget. Maybe it suits them to be as opaque as possible.
If they are, then there will be times when the NHS is in massive annual deficit simply due to pension payouts alone – not something I expect to be mentioned much by the bBBC.
In public sector la la land (as btw with the ONS ASHE tables this week) pay comparisons with the private sector ALWAYS ignore pension benefits, which is convenient as the average £6000 per annum higher salaries in the public sector would become an even higher number, and then the rather gullible private sector workforce might sit up and take more notice that they are paying taxes to fund pensions for others way beyond their own.
Another thing that is never mentioned. How much of the NHS budget is swallowed up servicing Brown’s disastrous PFI schemes. I expect that it would cover the shortfall many times.
My father is a retired surgeon. He would have thought it utterly unthinkable for a doctor to go on strike, whatever the reasons, but it seems today’s medics have different priorities.
And what is it about actors who think that because the act out a role they become experts on it whose every utterance should be treated seriously.
Didn’t Martin Sheen once say to George W Bush “As one president to another…”?
I am sick to death of friends children who have studied medicine and to be told when they were applying for university “they are not doing it for the money” and now several years later, the government are terrible and isn’t their pay dreadful. But of course in days gone by medicine was a ‘profession’ which meant that yes your salary was high but you put a lot back way beyond what you were paid. Today’s young medics, threatening to emigrate, forget their training has cost the country in ss of £300,000 to train them. If i was Jeremy Hunt I would write into doctors contracts that if they emigrate they must pay back the cost of their training (it happens to teachers who change schools). Last night’s Eddie Mair programme was full of sympathy for the poor dears eg soft interview with a female who was going to strike.
Most doctors I know are arrogant greedy shits. The strike hardly changes this impression. For most of its history medicine was nothing more than a scam. You can know more than your local GP simply by looking up things on the Internet.
Wow!
No-one is forced to consult a doctor !
Wild,
Sorry, but I can’t agree. I, quite literally, know hundreds of doctors and I can count the number that are “arrogant greedy shits” on one hand.
To say that “you can know more than your local GP simply by looking on the internet” is akin to saying that you can know more about golf than Rory McIlroy by looking on the internet – try it and see how you get on.
Wild isn’t so far off the truth. My wife nearly died when she was misdiagnosed by one of the local GPs. She had been feeling very poorly for a few days, being in agony when she tried to walk – so much so that she screamed in pain. I noticed that one of her legs was swollen. As she was unable to walk, I phoned our local surgery and asked for a home visit. The doctor arrived, examined my wife and diagnosed her with some unspecified “virus”. I pointed out her swollen leg and voiced my fears of a deep vein thrombosis. All he said was to keep monitoring her, but he was sure it was a virus. Two days later she was in A&E suffering from a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot in her leg. She was very lucky she survived it as we were told that only 5% of those affected live through it. So I, as a layman, was proved correct. Now I have no faith in NHS doctors, although to be fair, the staff in A&E saved my wife’s life – so I’ve no complaint against them.
Good for you. Hope you have internet handy next time you need medical help! You’ll deserve exactly what you’ll get. Then again maybe you could use the 111 “NHS Choices”which like you is a TOTAL JOKE!
I agree. All the average GP cares about is blood pressure & cholesterol & we pay them enormous salaries. They are not worth it, you could take just about anyone of the street, train them to measure blood pressure & send the patient to a nurse to have a blood sample taken for cholesterol measurement. A computer would tell them what drugs to prescribe & what dose & they could then experiment with the drugs on their patients just like ‘qualified’ doctors do. You can indeed know more than your GP by looking things up on the internet. This way I have made GPs get quite resentful & feel inadequate & squirm with embarrassment.
To be fair, conscientious doctors (there are some) are very well aware of the deficiencies of modern GP practise but they are forced to operate in that manner by the top-down NHS system in which they work. The methods and means of treatment have to be followed, whether agreed with or not.
That said, modern medicine is a mess and the NHS provides one of the worst examples of how bad things are.
Wild
Sorry can’t agree in that you can self diagnose on the Internet, and certainly you shouldn’t buy drugs on the Internet. love or loath the medical profession, in England it’s pretty good and hospitals do by and large a good service, because clearly there is not the shortage of funds the BBC and labour would like you to believe.
While acknowledging that LBC is a private radio station etc, I still find it worrying that on many issues, the NHS in this instance, they are promoting views which are very similar to those laid out by the bbc. It’s as though there’s an unwritten agreement with all national broadcasters on what the narrative; ie storyline, rather than the truth; should be.
Meanwhile, the ‘poor, underfunded, cuts’ NHS agenda continues on bBBC, the broadcaster for the public sector.
“Overspending by NHS trusts in England has risen to £1.6bn this year as concerns about the financial problems grow”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34879194
£1.6bn ??? Petty cash. See posts at 1.09 and 1.58. If I’m going wrong, be delighted if someone would show me where.
The BMA is no different to any other militant anti-Tory trade union and just as hypocritical.
They moan about ‘lack of funding’ in the NHS (aka why isn’t there an open cheque book) yet refuse to make foreign health tourists pay for their treatment with the excuse ‘We are not the government’s border guards’ – coincidentally in tune with a leftist open-borders, redistributionist agenda – yet every other health service in the EU and probably the world seems to manage it (ever tried getting a GP appointment in Greece without paying?).
And their leader has a photography business he runs at the weekend, apparently, blatantly advertised on the internet (weddings a speciality).
I have yet to hear any of these challenges from the BBC, who treat the BMA sympathetically as yet more ‘victims’ of the nastytorycutz.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. One of the most critical aspects of the jobs of the Chief Executive Officer and the Chief Financial Officer of any organisation is, by hook or by crook, to control the income and expenditure of the organisation so as to ensure that it is financially stable – and, in a public sector organisation, since it is not constrained to producing a profit, that means maintaining its expenditure at, or within, the limits of its income. – i.e. to keep within it’s budget. That’s what a budget is for, it’s a key yardstick by which the organisation, and specifically the ability of the officials in the two positions mentioned above, is essentially measured.
When the hell are any CEO’s or CFO’s in the health sector going to be held accountable, and if found wanting – fired ? These organisations are almost certainly deliberately busting their budgets and effectively challenging the government of the day to do anything about it…. other than knuckling under and taking the money they have overspent from some other source in the public sector, or, as most left-wing organisations in the UK would have it – run up even more debt for the country or boot taxes through the roof.
They’re already reportedly £1.6 billion overspent this year, and virtually every day, it seems, there are Health Service Unions, left-of-centre think tanks, and advocates of higher health spending like the King’s Fund, bleating ceaselessly that this or the other segment of the NHS MUST be given even more money immediately, or else some unimaginable fate will befall the country. The BBC and its fellow travelers revel in these claims, if they don’t quite actually incite them.
A quick example of a few CEO’s or CFO’s being booted out as failures would focus the mind of these heads of public sector organisations – just being treated as they would be in the private sector (i.e. the wealth-generating part of our economy) for much lesser failures.
Oops – meant to add the following to the above post. Apologies.
The most immediate thing that should happen is that the CEO and CFO from each of those overspending organisations should be hauled aside and asked the following three questions…
1. Why has this overspending occurred ?
2. Why have you personally allowed it to happen ?
3. What plans have you already put in place, and what plans are you about to put into action, to rectify any over-spending by the end of this financial year ?
If satisfactory answers are not forthcoming, then fire them for incompetence. You only need a book-keeper to be able to tell you that you’re overspending against budget, you don’t need to employ a very-highly-paid CEO and CFO to do that job.
Two excellent posts there, Richard D.
The Mail (for all its many sins) had been running an excellent campaign (backed by the Taxpayers’ Alliance) on the vast amounts of money sloshing around in the public sector and, in particular, in the management of the NHS. Sadly, events in Paris more or less drove the investigation off its pages last week.
There are many things wrong with the NHS but until the corrupt, decadent and wholly incompetent management structure is sorted out, the sums will never add up and the cats will only get fatter at the expense of the public.
It is only to be expected that the BBC, which has never seen a public sector body it didn’t fall in love with, would champion the idiocy of the Leftist King’s Fund in bleating for ever more money, yet never, ever, examining why the NHS is so phenomenally inefficient – nor where the money actually goes.
“The NHS is vast bloated monolith and far too many within it are Labour partisans”
This applies to the Whole Public Sector, my usual mantra.
Who votes Labour?
Those on benefits, Public Sector “workers, Non-whites, the non-productive, the barely productive and the counter-productive.
“The BBC has gleefully been pushing their narrative…”
No evidence to support that sweeping statement, I notice.
“As you will know, the reverse is true”
Fallacy No.4: “Argumentum ad populum”
“…they have been offered a double digit base salary increase so long as they accept a reduction in the dangerous and vast overtime hours they work”
How long did it take you to come up with such a duplicitous sentence, David? Well done.
Yes, they’ve been offered a reduction in overtime; by reclassifying “overtime” as “standard time”. Currently “normal” working hours are defined as:
7am-7pm Monday to Friday.
The new contract defines “normal” working hours as:
7am-10pm Monday to Saturday.
Thus, any rise in the “standard” rate of pay is more than taken away by the reduction of “overtime” rates.
Meanwhile, you enjoy (how many?) five star holiday resorts a year, and boast on twitter about your brand new Merc. Strange old world isn’t it…
But how does that compare with your BBC salary, Jason?
Jason you need to Vote here ………………………….
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/end-the-bbc-licence-fee
Tell your buddies.
“The BBC has gleefully been pushing their narrative…”
No evidence to support that sweeping statement, I notice.
See my post above. It’s the age-old BBC trick of providing one of their sacred causes – in this case an unreformed, bloated, archaic, money-burning NHS – with a platform and then doing little to challenge it.
The NHS was a piece of genius by the 1945 Labour government. It entrenched socialism at the heart of the British nation, seemingly for all time, and ensured that over the years, a large section of the most educated and influential people in Britain, the medical profession, had absolutely no experience of working in anything but a socialist structure. Any attempt to “reform” the NHS is doomed, because, like the BBC, it cannot be “reformed”, it is what it is, a 1940s socialist monolith. Other countries have other ways of providing affordable healthcare for all, the US system is about the worst imaginable, but systems of social insurance work well elsewhere. But in Britain, for our health care system it is always 1948, and, it seems, it always will be.
“but systems of social insurance work well elsewhere”
Here’s a list of health expenditure by different countries:
http://bit.ly/1MHJdHH
Which of them do you think have better health care for less money?
Bit of a master of sweeping statements yourself, Jason.
So here are cancer survival rates for starters….
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11490398/Cancer-survival-rates-in-UK-are-a-shameful-decade-behind-Europe.html
Survival rates for common cancers in the UK are trailing at least a decade behind other European countries, a charity has warned.
Macmillan Cancer Support said survival rates in Britain were “shameful” with many other countries doing better in the 1990s than the UK has managed recently.
The new analysis examined survival rates for breast cancer, bowel cancer, stomach cancer and lung cancer.
It found that for each type of cancer, latest published five-year survival rates in the UK – covering the period between 2005 and 2009 – were worse than they were in many EU countries at least a decade earlier. .
You’ll notice both Finland and Italy are below the UK in your expenditure table.
So you see, it’s not all about money, but that is a concept you lefties never seem to be able to grasp.
I refer to my other answers.
Do global comparisons include pension liabilities, which for the nhs is one of the biggest, rarely mentioned, expenses?
And do the comparisons include the contribution from individuals, which in the uk is diddly squat? In other words people elsewhere put their hands in their own pockets.
Without this info, comparisons are highly suspect.
“But how does that compare with your BBC salary, Jason?”
I spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week looking after my mother who has second/third stage Dementia. I get one hour max in the morning to leave her on her own in the morning to go to the supermarket if she’s feeling ok, and a few hours after she’s gone to bed. Recently she’s been unable to work out how to use the toilet. I’ve lost touch with most of my old friends (apart from a golden few) simply because I’m never available.
I survive on £95 a week “Carer’s Allowance“ + “Income Support”.
So kindly do me a favour… Find the nearest mirror you can find, and politely tell your self to fuck off.
You sound very bitter about your lot in life, Jason – fertile ground for left wing propaganda and grievance mongering. AND before you complain about me being unsympathetic – my father died of a form of Alzheimer’s, Louis Body Syndrome, so I know what it’s like looking after someone like your poor mother but it hasn’t left me embittered. Life’s shit and then you die.
You have my sympathies.
As an only son I ended up readjusting my career to look after my mother when she was similarly diagnosed. Kept her at home near family as long as we could until physical needs meant she had to enter a care home, and of course daily visits.
This was all paid without recourse to the state.
Hence I became a home worker, facilitated in some small way by the Internet, which enabled me to earn whilst attending her needs. After her sad passing the routine was impossible to return from, so the gap left caring does enable me to indulge in online activity such as here.
Not quite 24/7, but certainly not 9 to 5. And of course, 365/365, WiFi permitting.
Which is, as some felt worth noting, why I do spend a fair time here, albeit mostly on matters of BBC failures in accuracy and lapses of objectivity and integrity.
When caring for my Mum spare time was precious, so I used it wisely. But though limited it was evenly spread.
That you devote yours mainly at weekends here is unfortunate. I doubt your mother gains much from your choice of alternative activity.
And yet you find time in your busy life to come on here and bore us with your hand me down Labour talking points?
Take your own advice.