Per person spending on health care in 2016, a comparison:
The US: $9,364
The UK: $4,094 https://t.co/JCHNisFqT9 #HealthSpending pic.twitter.com/EQwHg94FPs— Commonwealth Fund (@commonwealthfnd) July 17, 2017
Over the past week I’ve heard on the BBC that the NHS is failing and that we are lagging desperately behind the rest of the world…hmmm…what I hadn’t heard were the results of the latest Commonwealth Fund survey on health systems from around the world….possibly because the BBC wasn’t making its the results headline news for some reason.
The NHS has been ranked the number one health system in a comparison of 11 countries.
The UK health service was praised for its safety, affordability and efficiency, but fared less well on outcomes such as preventing early death and cancer survival.
So ‘the NHS has been judged the best, safest and most affordable healthcare system out of 11 countries analysed and ranked by experts from the influential Commonwealth Fund health thinktank.’
The BBC slips in…
The UK health service was praised for its safety, affordability and efficiency, but fared less well on outcomes such as preventing early death and cancer survival.
What it misses out is that we are rapidly improving our death prevention….
In general, the U.K. achieves superior performance compared to other countries in all areas except Health Care Outcomes, where it ranks 10th despite experiencing the fastest reduction in deaths amenable to health care in the past decade.
How can the NHS be top after being sold off to the lowest-bidding private contractor, nurses having to go to food banks, what nurses there are left in the NHS that is, and an NHS in critical condition on the brink of destruction that, as the last post told us, only Labour can save?
The NHS has held on to the top spot despite the longest budget squeeze in its 69-year history, serious understaffing and the disruption caused by a radical restructuring of the service in England in 2013.
Those other countries…third world no-hopers?…hardly…and Obamacare is working well no?….
The rankings
- UK
- Australia
- Netherlands
- Norway
- New Zealand
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Germany
- Canada
- France
- United States
Is this NHS the item that every third day the Today programme makes its headline about a crisis within it and every other day its third down the headlines about some other crisis ?
Makes you think if there was no NHS there would be no crisis x 10 .
You cannot make a comparison of costs without also comparing taxation, and preferably also the cost of living.
In the US, tax rates differ significantly, but on average are far less than in the UK. For example the average tax rate by income in the US is(according to https://www.sapling.com/8421893/average-effective-tax-rate-income) said to be:
Incomes Less than $99,999
Effective tax rates for returns in all income brackets range from less than 5 percent to more than 80 percent. However, depending on tax credits and adjustments to income, the majority within different brackets fall within a particular range. For example, the majority of taxpayers reporting an adjusted gross income of less than $50,000 paid an average effective tax rate of less than 9 percent. For taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of $50,000 to $99,999, the majority also pay an average effective tax rate of less than 9 percent.
$100,000 to $200,000
The average effective tax rates for the majority of taxpayers reporting an adjusted gross income of $100,000 to $200,000 was less than 20 percent. The highest percentile within this tax bracket paid an effective tax rate of 10 to 14 percent.
Readers may recall that when there was a row about the amount of tax that Trump pays (he paid about 5% more than Obama), even at his level, he was paying less than 26% tax. According to http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/tax/how-much-do-the-obamas-pay/news-story/0c1e91cdd50406e68e590b68052432e5
Thus on earnings of about £350,000, Obama was paying less than the UK basic rate of tax of 20%
According to the New York Times
And Romney is a very wealthy individual.
Generally speaking, the cost of living (especially housing, food, clothes, cars and electronics) is far cheaper in the US than is the case in the UK, but salaries may be a little lower (but that seems to have changed in recent years).
The upshot is that given the savings in tax, notwithstanding the extra health care costs (which may be higher than indicated when one takes account of families), the vast majority of US citizens are considerably better off than the comparable UK citizen.
One of the most extra-ordinary vote of confidence by the BBC is that almost all BBC staff managers have BUPA private healthcare subsidised by the BBC. The same can be said for many in the Labour Party who prefer to put their own children in ‘private’ schools rather than compete with other laggards in the state sector. One of the most offensive pieces of nonsense by Lord Hall when trying to justify high saleries and the last BBC Charter debacle was to compare the BBC to the NHS (which it still does). Both are badly managed, both are over staffed (with managers) and consultants who should not be there, both suffer from lack of private investment, both suffer from outmoded dependence on changing government subsidies and taxes (the TV license is a tax), both suffer from financial abuse of the tax systems whilst the BBC also adds in its own ‘luxury’ brand of sexual abuse as entertainment (and then blames that on the lack of NHS funding).
If push comes to shove (and it might) that the BBC is largelly un-sustainable in its current form (and it knows it) whilst the NHS is also largelly unsustainable in its current form (but it cannot admit it). One thing both have in common is that both are too large to fail and have to be propped up by the taxpayer. If you work for the BBC in which case you can afford to ‘opt out’ of both and watch Sky TV whilst having your own private Doctor paid exclusively by the TV license fee payers who are largelly unware that the BBC promote things that are largely (unhealthy) and financially unsustainable to any form of government that is elected.