Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

There are always people running in online to say that since "both sides" detest the BBC they must be doing something right, but that's ignorance at best, if not plain disingenuous. The BBC have an insanely pro corporate pro war stance, and have wielded it in elections with craft and force. Same w the others.

It's not just me saying all this either. Many have noticed. Many decry the loss of a balanced media landscape. But you won't hear about it on corporate news, or the Beeb or the Grauniad either.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/john-pilger-says-guardian-column-...

And without that staff, The Guardian can’t do proper investigations on london real estate’s connection with major money laundering for instance.

Indepedent like someone else pointed out is owned by a Russian oligarch. BBC doesn’t have the mandate to do investigative deep journalism, they can only do reports or documentaries - but that BBC can’t break a major story or investigate anything of political importance because that would jeopardise their “apolitical” position.

This leaves the right wing media, which is the majority in the UK (opposite to the US, in the UK the right wing dominate the media) and they manufacture and manipulate the stories into seemingly-real controversies that are actually just a cover for them to get some law or change passed in Westminster. Read the book “Fake Law” - the way the Mail/Times/Telegraph have distorted even simple judicial cases into something they could use to get popular support for whatever their owners wanted is profoundly disturbing.

This old chestnut. Go read the Rome treaty or the Schuman declaration. The “it’s only economic” is a lie you’ve been sold by your own governments. The aim has always been political Union, from the beginning.

Besides, the EU being “a trading bloc” would not solve any of the issues facing the British government, which mostly result from the government having mutually exclusive demands and being unwilling to keep its word and following the agreements it signed. Including on imports and exports, which is the essence of a trading bloc and would not be improved one bit of the EU were only one of those.

In general, from a user's perspective, Spanish healthcare tends to work better than the NHS in many regards, albeit with less flexibility at the GP level and more of a hassle when moving between regions. Anecdotally, from the experience of Spanish friends having lived in countries with a more or less public-private model (Belgium, Germany, Ireland) have expressed that the systems there are generally worse, and miss the Spanish healthcare system.

However, different regional governmens have made a greater or lesser move towards covert privatisation via externalisation, and while the two that have done it the most (Catalonia and Madrid) are generally the worst performers, there is little correlation otherwise. The Basque Country, Navarre, Asturias and Aragon are all top performers, yet the first two have privatised significantly while the latter two have kept the system more fully public. On the other hand, Andalusia with very little privatisation is together with Madrid and Catalonia as one of the worse.

And yet, when compared by investment, the pattern becomes much more clear. Madrid, Catalonia and Andalusia have some of the lowest healthcare investment per capita. The Basque Country, Navarre, Asturias are some of the greatest investers—Aragon not so much, but still on the top end of the scale.

(*) As a digression, due to historical differences in how each system evolved, they are not quite the same. Spanish healthcare evolved from Social Security, and thus used to require being either employed, officially on unemployment, or being a dependant of someone in either circumstance (now it's more lenient). Also, all doctors involved are state employees. The NHS on the other hand evolved as a right of all legal residents of the UK, and GPs surgeries are almost always private businesses that are adscribed to the NHS.

Depending on what happens in the next few years it could well be that they become the party against power. Which would be a rather interesting inversion from the last 40 years.

Which raises a lot of uncomfortable questions for people whose world was informed by Reagan, Thatcher and Bush.

While this wasn't previously the case, the spatial and socioeconomic patterns are increasingly similar to that of the Democrat/Republican voters in the US, from what I can tell. The leftward travel of the Democrats is a large part of that. But the left/right inversion in the UK has been slowly coming for decades, but the FPTP system hid that in the outcomes.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/10/starme...

I know this is brushed off or denied by the intelligentsia, and I know the ruling class (no matter what the party) never worked for the interests of the people but themselves, but nevertheless the working class is turning to conservative politics. The really sad thing is very few people on the left seem to be honestly asking why. What is their party doing so wrong that the least advantaged working class is voting for the parties traditionally associated with capital? Instead they seem happy making up feel-good stories about "the horrible uneducated racists voting against their own interest" to tell one another, and that is about the extent of their intellectual curiosity on the matter.

IE they had to provide care to everyone at a reasonable price.

I'm deeply suspicious of healthcare that gets to exclude people for cost reasons.

I too can provide great healthcare if everyone is mandated to pay me for my services and I get to exclude those I treat, that's a great business, the healthy pay and I exclude the sick, what wonderful pure profit business!

The insurance model bothers me for that reason, they really shouldn't be allowed to exclude anyone, if they're taking on the business of healthcare, then that's that, they are providing a utility service, which means they supply to everyone and they make money by spreading the cost between everyone.

There are nuances to that, but practically that's the goal they should aspire to, but unfortunately that model isn't the most profitable.

I mean take a look at the original US health insurance that existed:

> The first plan guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for $6 a year, and was later extended to other employee groups in Dallas, and then nationally [0]

That insurance model worked, it just happened to get outcompeted by entities who were willing to undercut them by aiming to capture only the most healthy people, which is in effect a tragedy of the commons.

Which is a real problem in my book, I'd be fascinated to see what innovations a private company could come up with under that model. We might have missed out on a whole slew of interesting ideas if we kept going down that route, which would still have been a pretty profitable business and would have been a great success for those who do believe that the private space can do healthcare better.

As it stands I don't believe the current private model meets that criteria as it fails at the first hurdle of being a health care service, it doesn't care about health.

So it seems like the choices are bad private care, good public care and bad public care. So yea, I'm leaning to the good public care.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Cross_Blue_Shield_Associa...

I know the demographics in the US has vastly changed some cost models over that time, making some earlier social program hit major funding problems through no evil from govt actors.

Healhchare is tricky, because treatments are not one-size-fits-all. Large institutions are rigidly setup to deliver a product, a product that is ever changing, as new treatments are always being refined and added. When it was created it was set up to deliver products that were new 50 years ago, but the structure is inherently slow to evolve. But the private health insurance in UK does not have these problems. More effort could be made at growing the economy in such a way that rising incomes allow people to purchase the private health insurance. It's not an immediate answer for many, but it definitely beats throwing more money at a bureaucracy that cannot adapt.

Here's how you do it: you pump unsustainable amounts of money into the service over time. This allows you to offer a great service until in the future you can't pump enough money into it anymore. But that's a problem for the future generations. Those future generations were funding the previous generations all the while, but won't get the same benefits themselves.

An ever increasing percentage of GDP is being poured into the UK's NHS. At some point it's going to be too costly and the young generation at that time will have to pay for it, but won't get the same level of service themselves when they're older. They will be the ones left holding the bag.

I don't think there's a politically viable solution to this though. The problem with this model is that you're effectively borrowing from future generations, but the system takes so long to reach actual unsustainability that people will grow up with the feeling that the system is great.

Still, while waiting for patients to die is an cheap way to shorten backlogs, it does leave not instill confidence…

In the same decade the proportion of people aged 65+ increased from 16% to 22%ish of the population, an increase of a third. Since these are the people who consume the vast majority of NHS resource, the actual age-adjusted funding has been shrinking steadily every year.

In same vein the "every death" (or hospitalization) during the covid pandemic was due to covid and/or lack of vaccination.

I add quotation marks because in both cases I do not believe it's true.

https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/massive-increases-in-exc...

A lot of it is due cardiac reasons. You can also look at when excess death went up in younger age ranges that weren't affected by COVID and see that it starts at the same time the vaccine programme reached them. Hard to explain as lockdowns given they'd been happening for a year by that time.

Edit: Here we go. here's an analysis of deaths by vaccine status for the UK:

https://bartram.substack.com/p/deaths-by-vaccination-status-...

N.b. The way you calculate the population size heavily affects the meaning of this data and the government itself doesn't know what the population is, so there's plenty to debate here, but you can see why the author concludes there should be an investigation. He uses a conservative pop estimate based on official NHS registrations (because the ons estimate is definitely wrong) and plots the graph of the difference by status at the end. So you can set that for everyone under 75 the vaccines appear to be making things worse not better.

We make people pay for them. Like we do with every other resource on the planet.

Healthcare is something which should be accessible for all, and we can of course subsidise the less well off. But it still ultimately needs paying for.

It's not a system doing it. Healthcare professionals are choosing to work for private companies instead of the NHS. If you would like to ban that, then say so, but don't pretend there's an amorphous system to blame.

In this instance, the resources are humans, and it seems you want to force humans to do something they don't want to do. If you want slave-doctors just say so. It worked for the Romans I guess.

We also have a hugely archaic system in the Royal Colleges. In no other profession do we expect people to sit regularly very expensive professional exams, and expect the staff to fund them out of their own salary rather than them being funded by their employer. £600 a go is not unheard of.

I mentioned that we don't have the right to opt out of paying for the NHS. It's not possible go entirely private. If you could opt out, you could pay that money to a private provider instead and entirely forego the use of the NHS. That isn't an option today. But it should be.

edit: and of course you'll rely on NHS for any emergency.

[1] at least not without paying out of pocket for the significantly more expensive premium coverage. Some now offer phone consultations but you still need to go to the GP for referrals and prescriptions.

And fuck the NHS. Smash the shit out of it. We'll all die exactly the same number of times without it, but be healthier and happier on the way.

Eg: It's currently almost impossible to get routine or early-stage healthcare. If I want a routine doctor's appointment, I have to phone every day at 8am when the next batch of appointments are released, and hope I get one. Last time, it took hours on hold, and attempts over several days, to get one.

Genuinely, why are refugees something to be prioritized over a cultural touchstone institution if the goal is preserving historical character?

But that's something most people don't use or even like. A stable job and better safety nets are preferred, and here DE/FR/etc excel.

This looks to be backed up by: "Based on trends observed in early estimates of household final consumption expenditure, household spending on outpatient and hospital services, which include self-funded and insurance-funded treatments, grew by 24.5% and 31.3% respectively in 2021." https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

But that link also says that NHS spending is 83% of health spending, so like I said I can't get the numbers to add up.

I have my own story of US healthcare which may be enlightening. It happened to a friend of mine. Let's say this friend is not particularly well to do and lived with his 2 brothers, but they don't always get along that well. At some point, they got into an argument that escalated into an altercation where one brother broke a poolstick over my buddy's head. He had a concussion and laceration needing stiches, so he went to the ER. He was unable to remember his name or which ER treated him, and as a result, was never billed for the care provided and learned the key to universal healthcare in the US - he just gives a fake name at the ER now.

Yes, that's how inflation works. Not a new problem, and GDP generally grows accordingly as well.

It still remains to be seen how many people Covid will kill annually over the long term, but currently most of the people dying from Covid are the same people who would usually die of flu or other usually minor illnesses. Flu deaths have been significantly lower than typical, and until recently, we had negative excess deaths. It's now positive again, but as the article says, the current view is that's due to the medical backlog and not deaths from covid.

> because they're still dealing with COVID-19.

They're not really. My partner is an ICU nurse, and the nurses and doctors themselves largely don't think about it much now unless they're treating it, which isn't that common. Covid used to be something they'd be talking to me about every day, now I'm not sure they've mentioned it in the last month. Doctors and nurses are having work parties with none of them wearing masks. Only about 10 patients a day are admitted to the ICU due to covid across the whole country, and most of them are for reasons other than covid. Again, those are usually the patients who would be very ill from flu. Think 85 year olds with comorbidities.

They are still dealing with it in the sense that any time a patient tests positive for covid, they still send a bunch of the staff who had contact with them away for two weeks. Sometimes some of them end up very slightly ill with covid, and a few others test positive without symptoms. Which, again, nobody ever did for flu, despite it killing more than ten thousand people a year. Many of the staff think this is silly, but given the pressure they're working under due to staff shortages, few complain about two weeks off.

> We can do much better than this. Something like 80% of the population has been vaccinated, which is far lower than it could be,

Rising up to about 95% in vulnerable populations. It could always be theoretically better, but if the remaining people are unwilling to take the vaccine, then that's where it's going to stay. The covid vaccine uptake is approximately the same as the seasonal flu vaccine uptake overall, and by demographic, is higher. Overall uptake has wildly exceeded expectations.

If you just look at antibodies instead, 96% of people have detectable antibodies and 70% (likely more) have actually had covid already.

> we aren't giving regular booster doses like we do with the flu.

We don't give everyone the annual flu booster. Most healthy people of working age don't get the flu booster each year. So far, everyone has been offered the vaccination and one or two boosters.

We also currently have a new autumn booster programme being prepared for the Omicron variant.

That means that by the end of this year, Covid will have been around for three years, and vulnerable people who would be eligible for the annual flu vaccine would have been offered five Covid vaccinations.

I haven't had covid and don't want to get it.

So safe they need to avoid liability? So safe many of the vaccines had complication rates far higher than any flu vaccine in history?

Look I'm glad we had the vaccines so quickly. Trump pushing them through regulation was extremely good for man kind and we have all benefited.

But stop acting like there is no risk.

Thanks for your hard work. Politics have entirely abducted reason on this topic. We all so clearly fear that the same certain thing may be true, so we are left doing nothing that matters.

Birthrates went down, so supply of labor decreases, so prices have to increase to attract more people to do the desired type of labor. Or if the country is desirable enough, the country can open up immigration to increase supply of labor and keep prices lower than if they had kept immigration closed.

Domestic labor can keep moving onto more desirable jobs while immigrants keep doing the less desirable work in exchange for being able to immigrate. Works well, until birthrates drop too low and/or immigrants stop coming for whatever reason.

If you disagree, say why. One person bothered to do that and I agreed with their point.