that fact that people disagree means nothing and should be ignored as people disagree all the times about anything and everything.
The NHS used to own its radiography suites. It used to own its land and buildings. It used to hire doctors and nurses and support staff directly.
But because of a [also recent] forced-tender system, and high breakthrough prices on in-housing projects, it was deemed "cheaper" to let private providers burden the upfront costs of equipment, land and building management, and short contract management.
Shock, horror! Letting "interface companies" extract profit makes services more expensive, and now we're paying more, it's even less affordable to talk about major public capital investment to bring these critical, primary services back in-house.
The NHS needs to stand up for itself and politicians need to start talking about 20y plans. Making ends meet today isn't enough. Giving up, adding insurance companies to the mix won't do anything but make it even more expensive.
Nobody wants US healthcare, not even the US; to willingly introduce it here would be instant political suicide. That gives me hope.
And Conservatives have screwed things so hard in the past 12 years, I think there's genuine appetite for public investment. The current Labour party isn't the government it very nearly could have been in 2017 but if their recently energy policy[1] is anything to go by, they're not afraid of borrowing to invest in long term savings.
Energy is a great example. If we could become independent of oil and not just swap that for lithium/cobalt dependencies, that probably is worth the outlay. Healthcare falls into a similar bracket.
The added bonus is that if Labour gets a PR-like voting system implemented, it might be harder for any one (or two) parties to dominate politics and we could focus on goal-orientated politics. Maybe.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/27/labour-will...
Then Starmer can glide in, and do things that the Tories could never get away with doing, like privatizing healthcare.
> The added bonus is that if Labour gets a PR-like voting system implemented, it might be harder for any one (or two) parties to dominate politics and we could focus on goal-orientated politics. Maybe.
I doubt the PLP will ever show any serious effort to get this done. There's nothing they hate more than voting, and if there's any consistent policy from Labour it's that voting is an unfair commentary on things that average people are neither qualified nor deserving to discuss. They spend a significant amount of time as individuals trying to find people to remove the vote from.
Hospital needs a new MRI suite. To them, this would cost £2m for the machine, £400k for the room, and £500/h in running cost, £1.4m/year. The first 5 years costs are: £3.8m, £1.4m, £1.4m, £1.4m, £1.4m, ...
But which trust has £4m in their back pocket for y1 cost? Even if they did, it's a large project so has to go out to tender. A capital-investment-backed provider comes back with a flat cost of £2m/year. They might have the additional cost of land but many of these [currently, right now in many hospitals] operate in containers in the carpark. At £2m, they break-even after Y4 and produce £600k a year profit from Y5 for another 11 years. NHS loses £6.6m over 15 years.
And it's not that simple because their £2m bid will be interesting but there'll another for £1.5m at half-duty that will sell operational time to private providers, even direct-to-public (increasingly popular in the UK) at massive markups. They'll break even in Y3. Possibly even quicker if the hospital realises it needs full duty and pays triple-rate to book the machine out.
So the NHS picks a private provider. They make a 5 year saving, and take an 11 year beasting. And at the end of it, or even halfway through it when they discover they need even more capacity, they find out that their old suite is now a support ward. Or managers have moved in, or it's just fallen down. The cost to build a new suite isn't the £2.4m it would have been, it's £4m. To get so assuming we would now need two machines, it's an £8m y1 cost to bring this back in-house.
The long-term budgetary flexibility required to go back to running your own services is staggering and something that is very hard to sell to people not looking at TCO.
Year 1 is so high in the in-house models because that's what's paying for the machine.
Also, since I’m from the US, your example reminds me of Bobby Bonilla Day, jeered at as an awful deal for the sports team but in reality a fair present value exchange for forgoing a large short-term contract. (I realize unit specific numbers are just an example.) Fun recap, analysis and interview: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010404697/bobby-bonilla-day
Publicly Funded Infrastructure is a thing for Big projects, but what usually happens is the people asking for the money are so local and desperate that those with the money call the shots. A recently built nearby hospital has it in their PFI contract that they have to repaint the whole hospital with a specific provider every year for 30 years at whatever number they come up with. I'm not sure if the NHS trust even ends up with the buildings. Many school-improvement projects go through PFI and end up with public land being transferred to private interest. "Give us your old buildings and land, and £50m and we'll build you a new shiny one that's further away that you can rent from us forever." It's the budgetary simplicity that sells these awful deals.
Where it's important to draw the distinction between the NHS and the Bobby Bonilla deal is the UK government can generate money for public capital infrastructure through public debt and taxation. When they need money for war, state funerals, or propping up banks, they just do it and we burden the cost. They could say "We need a dozen MRIs in the next few years", raise some tax revenue, make a bulk deal, and actually make the saving the NHS was designed to make. They could in-house road building, centralise a prefabricated school building factory, employ local government services directly.
But public debt is bad and saving up is apparently somehow worse, and in any way competing with private companies [with deep ties to Ministers] is strictly verboten so we're left bouncing between external private providers and PFI.
Even before the corruption, I do understand the scale of the problem insofar as anyone can understand volumes of money that end in "tn". But shying away from it, cowering behind awful deals while losing public assets isn't a solution either.
To cap it off, when the mother asks if the child is a boy or a girl, Graham Chapman responds, "it's a bit early to start putting roles on it".
If you are serious, I have bad news for you. The situation is going exactly as expected. That’s the traditional Tory plan. Defund, complain it doesn’t work now that it doesn’t have money then make private.
British voters can only blame themselves. Between Brexit and decades of voting for the worst of the Tory, if they were less stupid, their country situation wouldn’t be so bad.
> British voters can only blame themselves. Between Brexit and decades of voting for the worst of the Tory, if they were less stupid, their country situation wouldn’t be so bad.
I've yet to see, in decades of Tory rule, much but decline, neglect, and scandal. Tax cuts and service cuts. That's all everyone needs apparently. Unfortunately, labor seems so incompetent at gaining power that it seems almost like a "managed opposition." Maybe I'm being too generous to their electorate as well. The UK is a tourism attraction at this point, a historical relic found in a curio shop or flea market. Or soon will be at its current clip.
Having the government in charge of something means it's always going to be inefficient.
Why? Sorry but that’s horse shit.
There is nothing preventing socialised medicine for working. It costs less per capita nowadays than it did when it was put in place and productivity skyrocketed since.
The economic arguments were always the very privileged hiding their greed and contempt for the rest of us behind a fine veneer. I truly believe some of them even came to believe it to help themselves sleep at night. It doesn’t mean we all have to drink it.
That's because of the budget cuts. Service will continue to be trimmed until the system collapses.
From "always going to be unaffordable" to "Service will continue to be trimmed until the system collapses"
Choosing not to pay for something —when you pay for so much else— isn't the same thing as not being able to afford its upkeep. It's an active decision, not a passive imbalance.
There is a level of healthcare that we cannot afford, but pretending that we're there already when we know privatising elements is going to make it more expensive for everyone is not honest. There are enough variations on the theme to know what works, and that our current system —while starved, and poorly served by central political whimsy— still delivers the best value out of any healthcare system.
As I've said elsewhere, subsidised childcare, after-school programmes, and mental and social health care all network together to keep us working at our best. Not only are they cheaper when centralised, relieving the burden makes people happier. Having to choose between your health and your job is no way to live and this ethos of welfare, having your citizens' backs is a key aspect of high-tax society. Once you stop worrying about poor people with less, life is better.
Seems like a sizeable portion of someone's personal responsibilities.
Ultimately the government needs to be in charge of healthcare because healthcare is not a simple service but a human right. In many ways, we might trade the benefits of competition (which in the long run do end up ruining the system, just look at the USA) for the benefits of democratic ownership.
In any case, as others have pointed out, the system can be turned inefficient if government by government you dismantle the system a little bit and that's precisely what's been happening in the UK. However, this is not something that has happened in other countries in Europe and in general socialised healthcare gives us the highest life expectancy numbers.
A peculiarly American dogma. The irony of trotting it out on the field of healthcare is lost on you, I suppose, but gave me a laugh. Thanks.
I've no illusions about the electorate but the Tories have spent their time distilling the party down to the extreme right wing element and that's —frankly— shown us all what a bunch of idiots they are. I can't remember a less electable bunch. https://twitter.com/UKPoliticalPics/status/15765728049624760...
They'll make some noise about fixing it initially, but then it's back to the defund-privatise treadmill.
There's a 20 year plan.
Make sure the private system that replaces it after spending 20 years looting it is as profitable as possible.
I believe the mechanism you're advocating for is generally referred to as a dictatorship.
There have been various contortions along the road; initially, the plan was that all GP surgeries would be required to upload patient data to the (shareable) national collection. The government partially backed down, allowing patients to opt out of that kind of sharing. A separate opt-out was required for data concerning hospital treatment. Both required patients to acquire and submit a paper form; there was no opt-out website.
Then they changed the structure of the sharing system a little, rendering prior opt-outs moot; you had to opt-out again.
You'd think the government would be able to make a lot of money out of this data; but one of the scandalous early deals they made was to sell the data of a million patients to the Society of Actuaries. For £3,000. Actuaries work for insurance companies; and insurance companies would dearly love to get their hands on people's health data. But £3,000?
Now Palantir's core business is collecting data. It isn't a medical company. Corellating "anonymised" data is what they do. They are hostile to privacy, and they are famously secretive.
There are people in government who want to privatize the NHS completely. Unfortunately for them, the NHS is probably the most popular institution in the UK; so they salami-slice. Various NHS services are privatized by stealth; the last CT scan I had was conducted in a van in the hospital carpark, run by some US health conglomerate. Various testing services have been fully privatized, with the original NHS services shut down.
So there are two threads behind this story: the creeping privatisation of NHS services, and the involvement of this creepy company in handling patient data.
Sweden walked this same path and is deeply deeply suffering the privatisation.
Doctors are nowhere to be seen, waiting times are absolutely impossible to work with. You basically have to beg to see a doctor and even then they will likely decline you unless you’re in pain.
It’s ridiculous. It can be directly attributed to the privatisation of the underlying services.
It just isn't news that a company that specialises in getting government contracts has a plan to get a government contract. There are too many tautologies here to get interested in them. Next thing we'll discover that the politicians are running the healthcare system based on political calculations instead of medical advice!
Palantir is just offering a "shiny dashboard", we should build your own...it is that easy, just knock up a Palantir competitor in a weekend (the NHS has decent tech units, but core NHS is like this...they hire £20k "devs", ask why they are getting hacked all the time, nothing works properly..."this tech stuff is all just rubbish"...it is like the late 90s).
The author spends an article outlining an elaborate plot then slips in that Palantir didn't actually manage to acquire anyone...and was working with the NHS years before this email was sent (and provided valuable support during Covid).
The irony is that this media coverage explains why healthcare tech is so bad in the UK (there is actually a listed company, worth £10m+...that is just a staff directory for hospitals, it is pre-MySpace tech, and tons of trusts use it...it is actually comic).
Is there a detail overview somewhere what products Palantir actually has, and what technology it uses for these products?
I would then be able recommend a decent NHS doctor who can look at that for you, free at the point of use, on my dime.
Very best,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controve...
But thanks for your input.