Comment by markharris99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markharris99 | Hacker News Reader

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> I had a similar experience earlier this year in the U.K., and the contrast was significant - in the U.K. one feels like an irritation and an inconvenience. "Bloody hell, what's a patient doing here? This is a hospital!".

I'm 50. I remember what London was like way before Labour first got into power.

Lets look at today. Immigration is way out of control. London has probably 10 million people? It's busting at the seams.

I even travel to the south near the beach. Waiting for a doctor there? Sometimes up to a month.

I can remember when I would call a doctor and be seen the next day. Not any more.

The reason for the attitude is that doctors and nurses are at breaking point. I'm sorry if the down voters don't like hearing this but it's true.

Incidentally I voted to leave. But I think it's too late. We should have left before Labour got into power with Tony Blair. Like the Democrats in the US, they wanted immigrants from all over to change the political landscape and keep them in power. Regardless of native population.

Family of a medic here.

There are a number of problems with this statement.

First, immigrants are overwhelmingly young and healthy. They are overwhelmingly in work (and therefore paying National insurance....)

So, to answer your questions directly:

1) you can't get an appointment because GPs are either going bankrupt, or retiring faster than they can be replaced.

2) Baby boomers are all starting to succumb to chronic problems like diabetes, cancer, dementia etc. This costs a very large amount.

3) Diabetes costs 20% of the total NHS budget[1].

3) Social care budgets have been slashed, which means that old people come in to hospital for X, go home too early and with no support and come back with either a compound fracture or pneumonia.

4) The increase in NHS demand is 4% annually.

5) the "funding increase" comes from the cut in community & social care.

6) the degradation is entirely down to the lack of funding since 2010

[1]http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/04april/Pages/nhs-diabetes-costs...

The uk hospital was in North Wales - the most overwhelmingly white corner of the country that suffers from a decreasing and aging population. Most of the doctors and nurses were immigrants, from the EU and beyond.

I'm not even going to venture to disagree with you, I'll just provide those facts.

It's not a zero-sum game, there aren't a finite number of hospitals and doctors. 26% of our doctors are immigrants. Immigrants pay tax, which we can spend on more hospitals and doctors. They're disproportionately young, so they have a disproportionately low need for healthcare. Immigrants are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

We simply don't spend enough on healthcare. We have an ageing population with increasing medical needs, but our spending hasn't increased commensurately. As more people reach retirement age, the ratio of workers to pensioners falls. We don't want to pay more in tax, so inevitably we'll end up spreading our resources more thinly.

>> Like the Democrats in the US, they wanted immigrants from all over to change the political landscape and keep them in power. Regardless of native population.

You're being downvoted to unreadability anyway, but I feel I should clarify this just for the sake of people who are unaware of it: immigrants to the UK don't get a vote in parliamentary elections and therefore Blair's Labour could bring in the entire population of Asia, he still wouldn't have got a single vote out of them.

And he couldn't have just given them all British citizenship either: in general one needs to have residence before being elligible for citizenship.

Residency is obtained automatically after five years of living in the UK (if you can prove it anyway). Parliamentary elections happen every four years. We now have a Tory government, the second after ten ish years of Labour. Clearly, if Blair had a cunning plan it wasn't cunning enough.

And even if the numbers don't move you, think of it this way: if immigrants had any say in the governing of the UK, the country would not have just jumped off a cliff with a weight tied around its neck (a.k.a. Brexit).

Just to make even clearer, residents cannot vote in general elections, unless they are from the commonwealth.

If doctors and nurses are at breaking point, its down to them been underfunded and under resourced. Blaming this on immigration is unhelpful and wrong!!

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