From the BBC:
The NHS in England is to get an extra £20bn a year by 2023 as a 70th "birthday present", Theresa May says. It means the £114bn budget will rise by an average of 3.4% annually - but that is still less than the 3.7% average rise the NHS has had since 1948...
The five-year funding settlement covers just front-line budgets overseen by NHS England. About a 10th of the overall health budget is held by other bodies for things such as training and healthy lifestyle programmes, including stop smoking services and obesity prevention programmes. The BBC understands these will be protected, but beyond that it is unclear what will happen to them.
?!? One-tenth of £114 bn is £11.4 bn, which is approx equal to our net contributions to the EU budget.
Would anybody like to chip in for a battle bus, with "We spend £220 million a week on stop smoking services and obesity prevention programmes. Let's fund the NHS instead." written on the sides?
Two Birds, One Stone!
1 hour ago
14 comments:
Photoshop would be a lot cheaper and just as effective.
B, I couldn't find a decent meme generator.
Not least because the more people who die young from heart attacks and and lung cancer actually cost the NHS less than if they became healthy living types and lived to a ripe old age. Its old people who use up NHS resources the most - the last decade of a long life will be where people soak up most NHS resources. So spending NHS money on trying to get us to live longer is actually a double whammy - taking money away from care today, and increasing the demands on the NHS in the future.
S, indeedy!
Loads of money going in will, as ever, find its way into higher salaries, shiny machines that go "Ping!" with no one trained to use them and other extravagances. Oh, and pensions and bigger departments for ordering stationery, toilet paper and the like.
The whole thing is almost infinitely depressing. You'd think we'd never seen it before.
Heaven forbid that someone actually crack the whip and say " we want the service we signed up for: it's up to you to provide it with the taxpayers' money you're given"
The whole fund will end up in 'rents'. No measureable increase in productivity accrued from the doubling of the NHS budget under Blair / Brown. e.g. http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchives/2011/03/NHSreport.aspx
"
However, NHS productivity did not increase over this period. The most recent measure, which includes an element for quality improvements, shows NHS output increased rapidly between 1997 and 2008, at over 4.5% per annum, but the increase in inputs was even greater at almost 4.75% per annum
This £20Bn will not improve anything.
Smokers and the obese dying early does save an enormous amount of pension and old age care costs. But the cost of these conditions during working lives is considerable - just look at the diabetes bill, absenteeism, street cleaning, etc. Maybe free pies, booze and tabs once you get your pension?
Mombers. Do fatties and smokers 'cost' the NHS money? They may 'cost' the benefits system and their employers, but I am not sure that they are a net cost to NHS as they tend to die sooner and quicker.
FT, DCB, L, exactly.
M, I heartily disagree with you on this point. Be that as it may, neither of us has the actual cost stats to prove it one way or another.
But that is not the point.
The point is that spending £11 billion on these totally ineffective campaigns is a criminal (as in literally criminally corrupt) waste of money. It's jobs for the boys.
For clarity, I am a big fan of the NHS-style system. I just wish we spent a bit more on ACTUAL HEALTHCARE and a lot less on RENTS and WASTE.
"So spending NHS money on trying to get us to live longer is actually a double whammy - taking money away from care today, and increasing the demands on the NHS in the future."
But most importantly, it keeps the Puritans happy, and that's what counts.
Who are the main recipients of rent at the NHS's expense? Drug companies?
MW, L, we agree on smoking and obesity saving on old age costs. I'd wager that it saves more than it costs the NHS in working age healthcare TBH. Ideal world is you cut down on old folk lingering so long by encouraging more to take up eating pies, drinking ale and smoking tabs :-)
GC, the NHS is actually very good at quelling rent seeking from drug companies. They drive a hard bargain, only paying x amount for a QALY (quality adjusted life year). Drug companies often quietly give them a deal that fits into this limit, with a fat NDA on it to prevent others finding out how little they pay
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