Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

pydry

>For example you think everyone else thinks the NHS is awesome, because left-wing journalists

Or because 87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of it.

>you'd be shocked at how little support rail nationalisation would end up having.

56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.

>The NHS is a socialist anachronism

This is a popular view among investors & high net worth individuals. The US system is extraordinarily profitable as a mechanism for parasitic wealth extraction and UK based investors are not blind to this. They want some sugar too.

Nonetheless even UK right wing papers owned by those very people shy away from this view. 87% is above the threshold where they feel comfortable contradicting the popular view.

Rail nationalisation was below that threshold and the barclay brothers owned telegraph, for instance, would attack the idea with savage abandon of a rabid dog.

View on HN

Let's not forget that approximately 20% of all UK COVID cases were caught in hospital. Not exactly the envy of the world.

FWIW, I think we should keep the NHS and have it free at point of use. However, I don't really care how that service is provided - government employees, private, whatever - as long as the service is good.

> Let's not forget that approximately 20% of all UK COVID cases were caught in hospital. Not exactly the envy of the world.

Do you have a source for this? How does it stack up against other countries? Is it possible a greater share of people were hospitalised and thus the number of infections at hospitals was higher as a result?

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/the-ongoing-problem-of-hospita...

It's been getting steadily albeit very slowly worse for years. The Conservative government has been following a variant of the privatization handbook for over a decade now: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/tsa-as-example-of-pr...

Overall costs have not been going down much but various parts of the service are given to contractors who do a worse job at a higher price and take a fat cut. Richard Branson notably has done this. The PPE fiasco that caused much of the spread of COVID was largely because of this - much of it was bought and didn't arrive: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ppe-scandal-procur...

Nonetheless people's emotional impressions of the service tend to have a lag. Your Mother's cancer treatment from 9 years ago will have a much bigger effect on your impression of the institution than statistics about how well it is doing now.

Eventually it will be privatized entirely as a "fix" for the problems caused by privatization and the costs will skyrocket.

Just like the cost of my railway season ticket to London or a trip to the doctor in the US.

The key principle of the NHS is "free at the point of delivery". I don't really care who provides the service.

And let's not forget Tony Blair put in place some internal market reforms as well.

>The NHS is a socialist anachronism

I believe the NHS funding and operational model is similar to that used by military veterans in the US.

56% in favor. 15% actively against. Majority support even by members of the party that was most against it.

When Cameron first called the referendum Remain was in the lead. When topics are debated thoroughly in the public sphere and serious campaigns are run, people's opinions can shift pretty dramatically. That's why politicians campaign.

Nobody has ever spent time campaigning to keep railways privatised in the UK because the Conservatives have always chosen to fight elections on other issues, whilst Labour have made nationalisation a priority for years. If people were asked to make a direct decision on this and there was competent campaigning involved, I am very sure nationalisation would lose. The arguments are weak.

87% of Britons polled said that they are very proud of [the NHS]

The same poll showed even more people are "proud" of the fire brigade, although there's nothing special about the British fire service. They are also more "proud" of the post office than Oxford or Cambridge universities. All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS. The Conservatives have, for now at least, given up trying to debate it because they prefer to be a centrist party and because Labour consistently exploit people's emotions by conflating the NHS with healthcare. For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses and loving of cancer, or other nonsense.

>Just like with the railways, British people are not exposed to serious debate about the NHS.

They're exposed to investor dogma like yours on a daily basis from most of the investor owned media (telegraph, the mail, etc.). It isn't quite as vehement as yours because they know the limits of what their audience would accept but their owners views are broadly in line with yours.

It's a bit hard to attack an institution that cured your readerships' mother's cancer, for instance, and not lose their trust. They learned this lesson the hard way.

>For instance the left will happily imply that any criticism of the NHS (a bureaucracy) means hatred of nurses

They'll state that a below inflation pay rise does that because it does. They tried to supplant it with a weekly "clap a thon" instead. Cringeworthy.

Although, it's not strictly nurses investors and the investor backed government hate it's nursing unions, among other impediments to parasitic US-style profit driven value extraction.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

I don't even have any stakes in this argument, but:

> All that poll says is that people tend to answer "proud" (whatever that's interpreted to mean) when asked about institutions which they frequently interact with and are rarely exposed to any criticism of.

You just wrote above:

> One day you'll talk to a Brit outside of that bubble and get a real shock to discover they aren't enamoured with the NHS at all.

> plenty of people would love to move to a more standard social insurance model

Probably should choose one: either people have an bad opinion of NHS, or they don't.

My statements aren't in contradiction: there are absolutely people in the UK who are not enamoured of the NHS and it's not that hard to find them. They are probably not in a majority at the moment, but a well run political campaign could change that, because there are plenty of strong anti-NHS arguments that the population is rarely exposed to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com