Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To be stupid and even more
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd wreck the economy more
And when the papers all were signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing round and round
And clapping for the NHS
and banging pans and standing round
Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To wreck us all for evermore
Apologies to Simon and Garfunkel.
The above song came unbidden to me this morning. Its been a long time since I felt the need to blog but the extra 1.6 billion pounds that the government is going to give to the local councils ( despite cutting and curtailing their budgets by 3% each year for the last decade or more) just makes me aware that this all could be a nightmare that could have been avoided.
How you ask?
The full link can be accessed here (it's for medical professionals only). Well its a free country. Everyone should read it. and then take at least 10000 iu a day.
Fact is that 2000-4000 iu is woefully inadequate to beat infections. Your body will manufacture 20000 iu if you strip off and lie in the sun at midday in June until you turn slightly pink and you have enough cholesterol for the UVB rays to turn into Vitamin D3.
A bottle of 360 x 10000iu ( thats right 3.6 million units costs £25* (* average) might be less if you bought in bulk). The economy, work, everything that has happened in this country since the begining of March, need not have happened. We need not be in lockdown. The government could have spent £2 billion, which is a drop in the ocean to be honest considering how much they are flinging around willy nilly with no thought to the amount of debt that this will cause the economy.
Bought us all a bottle of that 3.6 million units and told us to all take at least 20000 iu a day to make sure we didnt succumb to Covid 19 and to boost our immunity and therefore protect the NHS, cure a few subclinical cases of rickets, stave off MS and a few other diseases and other viral conditions in the process.
It would have saved money and also saved the economy. We could have been in a better situation economy wise than Sweden and we neednt have had social distancing . By the way the deaths in Sweden are mostly from the Somali community who cant make Vit D in Sweden because they are so dark skinned and need five hours in optimal conditions with all their clothes off. And anyone who knows what Somalis wear in the height of a Swedish Summer will know that that doesnt happen. There have been countless articles asking why the BAME community are overrepresented in the death statistics. This is the reason.
I can probably guarantee you that most of the deaths above 65 were on statins. If you don't have enough cholesterol you cant make Vit D3 from the sun, there's simply not enough. Why are we languishing inside and not enjoying this sunny springtime weather? Because the government said so? Let me remind everyone that is reading here that every atrocity in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was legally sanctioned. By its government. The government and the health service if they had their heads screwed on should have made sure no one was Vit D3 deficient, for years. They knew that everyone was deficient. There have been countless articles since 2010.
Oh and tablets for a fat soluble vitamin? Do you see Vitamin E in tablets No you see it in oil. caps So tablets don't work.
The reason that the government didn't do this is because the pharmaceutical companies are losing profits and want to make a useless vaccine. There are coronaviruses every year, that are common colds. They've been working on a patented cure for the common cold since the 1950s . Unfortunately the only thing that actually works is a high level of Vitamin D3, which makes no money for the companies.
We've been sold down the river... Why have we sacrificed our economy when it had a simple cheap solution?
THINK! it could save your life. 97% of people in the UK are Vitamin D3 deficient. Start asking your MP about this document and why this deficiency which is widespread hasn't been tackled in the last ten years.
Sunday, 19 April 2020
Last night I had the strangest dream
Posted by
Henry North London 2.0
at
10:04
10
comments
Labels: big pharma, Covid-19, deficiency, Economy, Government spending, money, NHS, simon and garfunkel, Sweden, vaccine, Value for money, vitamin D3, vitamins
Tuesday, 2 June 2015
Jeremy Hunt on top form.
From the BBC:
... the pay packets of some NHS senior managers will also be trimmed. Currently, more than a fifth of all directors in the NHS earn more than £142,500 - the amount the Prime Minister is paid. Mr Hunt is asking Trust bosses to justify why.
Mr Hunt said: "The NHS is a public service and needs to show restraint on handing out generous pay packages as a matter of course.
"Expensive staffing agencies are quite simply ripping off the NHS. It's outrageous that taxpayers are being taken for a ride by companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor. The NHS is bigger than all of these companies, so we'll use that bargaining power to drive down rates and beat them at their own game."
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, has said the rising costs are partly due to hospitals putting more nurses on wards, following the public inquiry into the Stafford Hospital scandal. Others blame government mismanagement of the NHS.
I'm not sure that the NHS is "being ripped off" so much as "chucking money down the toilet", so Hunt is being generous to them. If you need permanent staff, then employ permanent staff; and to the extent that they have to balance out peaks and troughs, there is no earthly reason why the NHS can have its own pool of nurses in each area, it can't be rocket science to co-ordinate this.
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
11:49
10
comments
Labels: Jeremy Hunt, NHS, Value for money
Monday, 30 March 2015
Three cheers for Jeremy Hunt
From The Daily Mail:
A panel of scientific advisers had recommended in October 2013 that the vaccine should not be introduced as it was not deemed cost-effective. But ministers told the Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation to carry out another assessment and this concluded last March that it should be offered.
The Government then spent almost a year negotiating with drugs manufacturers trying to agree a cheaper price. On Saturday, the Mail highlighted how the jab was being denied to babies because of the cost row. Nearly 800,000 babies each year would be eligible for the jab at an average annual cost of £16million.
It's an impossible problem*, and fair play to Jeremy Hunt for going on telly and fronting it out.
The other good news is that a lot of health services around the world take the price the NHS have negotiated as their benchmark price and end up paying the same low-ish amount.
* On the one hand, the marginal cost to the manufacturer is pennies per dose.
But the value to the 'customer' is huge. The approximate cost to the NHS can be estimated in £millions, but how do you estimate the cost of the death and disability of possibly hundreds of people a year, i.e. the value of avoiding it?
The NHS wants to pitch the price closer to the pennies per dose (plus a reasonable contribution towards R&D costs) and the manufacturer wants to hold out for a price which is nearer the value to the customer. The difference is 'rent'. This wasn't an example of the UK government being hard hearted or intransigent, it was the manufacturer who was holding us all to ransom.
And how do you trade off that cost/benefit with the cost/benefit of all the other things people would like the NHS to do? The NHS/Jeremy Hunt's basic argument is (or should be) "Look, we are terribly sorry for the tragedies which have happened over the past couple of years, but with the money we've saved, we'll be able to treat lots of other people for other things."
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
10:30
10
comments
Labels: Jeremy Hunt, NHS, Value for money
Monday, 9 September 2013
Fun Online Polls: Syria & The cost of the 2012 Olympics
The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:
What do you think the UK government 'should' do about Syria?
Absolutely nothing, steer well clear - 89%
Enforce a no-fly zone, set up safe havens - 4%
Join in a full-scale invasion - 2%
Sell arms to "the rebels" - 1%
Fire off a few high precision missiles at selected targets - 1%
Other, please specify - 4%
That seems pretty conclusive to me. There was a high turnout for this one, thanks everybody who took part.
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This week's poll relates to The Stigler's post about the Olympics.
Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
08:00
0
comments
Labels: FOP, Olympics, Syria, Value for money
Thursday, 15 July 2010
More notional costing fun
adamcollyer finally answers the questions on Exam candidate now scoring negative marks:
What should Mr A do? Obviously build the conversion.
At last!
But then ruins it by introducing yet more unrealistic assumptions. He picks up on my statement that "The planning permission, and hence the land for new housing (which is what we are trying to discuss here), costs the council nothing" and says...
... sorry, but what a silly thing to say. If the council can give itself planning permission for the land it owns, then it could equally well sell that land with planning permission for a lot of money. So if it housed the tenants in private housing it could use the profit from doing that to offset the cost.
Yeah right. The council can obviously make a profit of £50,000 by granting itself planning permission for a house and selling off that bit of land (to use the same figures as before). And it could put that money in the bank (yeah, right, it will piss it up the wall, hand it to an Icelandic bank etc) and earn £1,500 a year interest (sticking with my 3%).
This £1,500 income would cover a quarter of the cost of renting back an ex-council house (using Adam's figures), or indeed a fifth of the cost of renting back one of the new houses that might be built (assuming they are a bit nicer than council houses, as Adam contends, and assuming that the private landlord bumps up the rent a bit, as is observedly the case).
Generating income of £1,500 in order to incur an expense of at least £6,000 looks a bit twattish to me, but this is what selling off council housing boils down to - which was a core Home-Owner-Ist policy pursued by successive UK governments.
You may well be right that it is cheaper to build council houses than to use private landlords. But I never said it wasn't cheaper. I just said it wasn't FREE. And it's not. And that is my last word on the subject...(you will no doubt be pleased to hear).
Of course I am right. As a taxpayer, I would vastly prefer more council housing to be built than for the DWP to pay Housing Benefit to private landlords. It is vastly cheaper in cash terms. That is the only decision we have to make.
(Whether the social housing generates a small overall cost or a small overall loss to the taxpayer is an unknown and irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. I have every reason to that assume the figure is so small that we might as well ignore it. I have never, ever said it was "free" or even disputed that it was "not free" as that word is fairly meaningless.).
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
17:28
4
comments
Labels: Accounting, Social housing, Value for money
As your teachers used to say, "Just answer the question!"
I tried to explain the concept of notional costing and how it helps with decision making here as follows:
... allow me to give a simple example:
Mr A and Mr B both have sons who attend the local university. Mr A's house is small, and Son A has noisy younger brothers and sisters, so Mr A (being a generous soul) pays £90 a week rent for Son A to live elsewhere (but Son A has to pay his share of the bills of £10 a week).
Mr B's house is big and Son B stays at home in a room which Mr B could sub-let for £100, but Mr B (also being a generous soul) allows his son to stay there for £10 a week, enough to cover his share of the bills.
Mr A has a cash cost of £90...
Mr B has no cash cost (quite clearly) but he has a notional cost of £90 (the rent he forgoes by undercharging his son rent or not chucking him out and sub-letting for £100 - which is clearly also an 'economic subsidy' to Son A) but Mr B also has the notional income, which he chooses in this example to spend on his son...
To finish off the analogy, imagine that Mr A bumps into a builder who can do a sound-insulated loft conversion for £15,000 which will add £20,000 to the value of Mr A's house and in which Son A would be happy to live. Mr A could save himself the actual cash cost of £90 and allow his son to stay living at home for £10 a week bills...
So the question is, if you were Mr A, would you rather have the loft conversion done for £15,000 (which would increase the value of the house) done or pay £14,000 in rent?
A Certain commenter is determined to "prove" that it is better to pay £14,000 in rent by introducing all sorts of increasingly unrealistic assumptions:
"In practice, the extension might only add £10,000 to the value of his house - in that case, are you going to add that loss to the cost?"
Yes of course. But as this loss is not realised until Mr A sells the house, we would also have to include the value of the extra room that he will be able to use or enjoy (once his son has moved out) until such a time; whether for storage, study, guest room (or indeed start charging his son full rent once he has qualified), whatever, which I have not included as the cost and the income net off to a small and uncertain amount either way*.
"Mr A's decision will depend on the interest rate he pays**, the increase in the value of his house that he gets by building the extension, and his view of what is likely to happen to house prices in the future. Which means that your case that Mr A should build the extension depends on his belief in ever rising house prices."
Nope. Mr A's decision depends on whether he'd rather shell out £14,000 in rent and get nothing in return, or shell out £15,000 and get considerably more than that in return in the future use of one extra room and an uncertain amount extra if and when he sells the house (which may indeed be as little as £10,000, but you don't get marks in an exam for completely re-writing the question and then answering that instead).
* We would, in practice, treat the £15,000 as a cost and include a) the additional resale value plus b) the future value-in-use as income. My original question assumed that a) + b) = "at least £15,000", so we can net off the cost and the income, and then exclude the net income figure from our calculations for uncertainty.
** The key to using notional costing as a decision-making tool is that you can ignore costs that are much the same either way: it is pointless including the interest cost on £15,000, because if Mr A chooses to pay the £14,000 rent he also has an interest cost, so all we are looking at is the net extra interest cost on the difference of £1,000, which is unlikely to be more than £50 a year anyway, so can be ignored. The commenter gets an extra mark deducted for including the interest cost on the option he doesn't like and ignoring the interest cost on the option he prefers.
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
15:14
2
comments
Labels: Accounting, Council Housing, Economics, Value for money
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Scottish Tories: The value-for-money party
From Public Finance
Scottish Tories have condemned plans by the Holyrood government to end the right of all new tenants to buy their council or housing association homes. Chief whip David McLetchie described the decision, the first major change to the policy introduced by the Conservatives 25 years ago, as an 'act of naked political vandalism'.
He said: 'Nearly half a million homes have been bought thanks to a policy which has done more to make housing affordable for working people in Scotland than any other before or since (1). At the same time receipts from sales, now approaching £7bn (2), have enabled other rented homes to be modernised and new council houses to be built (3) for those who continued to rent in the past 25 years.'
1) Are houses in Scotland particularly cheap or affordable? Nope.
2) £7 billion sounds like a lot, but divide that by half a million and the average selling price was £14,000 each. If they'd retained those, they could have collected twice as much in rent in the interim and still own the housing!
NB, average net rents in social housing (after Housing & Council Tax Benefit) are about £30 a week x 52 weeks x 20 years x 500,000 homes = £16 billion, plus a tenth of those will now be let to Housing Benefit claimants, call that another £2 billion cost to the taxpayer, total cost to the taxpayer £18 billion, give or take a large margin of error.
3) How many homes can you build for £14,000? A third or a quarter of a home, maybe? If my estimate of £18 billion loss is correct, they could have afforded to build another 400,000 units of social housing in addition to the 500,000 they shouldn't have sold off in the first place.
From the point of view of the taxpayer, who committed the bigger "act of naked political vandalism"?
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
12:34
8
comments
Labels: Scotland, SNP, Social housing, Tories, Value for money
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Fun Online Poll Results, the EHRC and the Royal Family
Turnout was quite low in last week's Fun Online Poll, but thanks to the 51 people who took part. The responses to the question "What should income-related benefit withdrawal try to achieve?" were as follows:
Minimise the cost of welfare - 47% (1)
Show people they can't get something for nothing - 24% (2)
Create jobs for bureaucrats and snoopers (incl. those who voted 'other' and specified something similar) - 22%
Encourage claimants to work cash-in-hand - 6%
Discourage claimants from working - 2%
1) I'm glad that nearly half voted for "Minimise the cost of welfare". Remember that people on welfare (including Tax Credits) lose between 70p and £1 in tax and benefits withdrawal for every £1 they earn gross (to which we add the unascertainable cost of all the form-filling and hassle). I see income-based benefits withdrawal as a kind of income tax on welfare claimants.
We know from the Laffer Curve that the revenue-maximising income tax rate is probably a lot less than 70% (let alone 100%), so if we want to collect as much 'tax' from welfare claimants as possible, surely it must make sense to see what happens if we reduce the withdrawal rate to the same as the basic rate of tax (which means, in practice, they would continue to be paid benefit and be given a BR tax code for PAYE if they work) with an extra 19% deduction for social tenants, instead of charging them below-market rents and then making them claim Housing Benefit if they can't even afford that (which could be collected quite simply by giving them a K-code for PAYE).
2) I simply do not understand why so many voted for "Show them they can't get something for nothing". The basic rate of benefits must surely be set at just above the breadline, i.e. £64.30 for Income Support seems 'about right'. Under current rules, a welfare claimant who finds low paid, temporary or part time work is barely better off if he accepts it, but with the withdrawal rate set at 31% or 50%, it would be easy to double or treble your net income. Isn't that far more likely to 'send a message' that work is the best route out of poverty?
I accept that 31% or 50% are probably not the 'cost minimising' rates of benefit withdrawal (it's probably more like 60%), but surely it is better to pitch them on the low side, as this makes work more worthwhile, with all round wider benefits to society and to employers, which are difficult to quantify but no doubt significant.
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OK.
Having found out that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission cost the taxpayer £51 million in its first two years of existence, roughly as much as The Royal Family (which costs either £7.9 million a year or £41.5 million a year, depending on how you interpret this article), so that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Who is better value for taxpayers' money: The Royal Family or the Equalities and Human Rights Commission?"
Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
16:20
3
comments
Labels: Equality and Human Rights Commission, FOP, Royal family, Trevor Phillips, Value for money, Welfare reform
Friday, 27 June 2008
Number crunching
Cost of maintaing The Royal Family: £40 million per annum.
Direct and indirect funding that political parties receive in each four-year Parliament: £1,750 million
Posted by
Mark Wadsworth
at
12:48
12
comments
Labels: HM Queen Elizabeth, Political Party Funding, statistics, Value for money