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HM The Queen in tax scandal!

Still, I'm admiring your tax expertise. I recently got an IFA ahead of retiring and I'm not sure how much of the "I" there is in his title- particularly given that I've handed him a fat fee already. Do you do homers?
PS I don't have a pot like Brenda's.
Perhaps you have a small pension pot. All my advice has been free but instead the IFA takes a % of the pot each year. Still 24% increase since the Brexit vote and thats after the IFAs 'cut'. You can of course do-it-yourself and save a few bob if you know what you are doing but in my case I wanted to protect my wifes inheritance after I've gone to that great gig in the sky so its a sort of insurance policy.

Cheers,

DV
 
Nor was the £350 Million.

it hints at the core of the problem however - the underfunding of public services. it's also simple enough for many of the thickos who voted for Brexit to understand.

Perhaps over supply? The NHS is providing services for which it was never designed so the funding structure for something unforeseen was never there.

Its time to rethink what the NHS should provide. If the decision is 'everything' then the cost will be towards the infinite. Its painful choice but it has to be faced.

Cheers,

DV
 
All my advice has been free but instead the IFA takes a % of the pot each year.

Therefore not free. The risk with this sytem is it inclines the IFA to promote the product that pays them the most commission, rather than what's best for the client.

Still 24% increase since the Brexit vote and thats after the IFAs 'cut'.

Is that all?!
 
Perhaps over supply? The NHS is providing services for which it was never designed so the funding structure for something unforeseen was never there.

Its time to rethink what the NHS should provide. If the decision is 'everything' then the cost will be towards the infinite. Its painful choice but it has to be faced.

Cheers,

DV
The infinite is a *really* big number.

Has anyone crunched the numbers and worked out (for example) what increase in the rate of income tax (at all tiers) would be needed to properly fund the NHS.

I haven't, but I'm willing to bet the answer isn't infinity.

As for "painful choices", I bet those who can afford private healthcare will be spared them under any reconfiguration of the NHS favoured by the Tories.
 
Perhaps over supply? The NHS is providing services for which it was never designed so the funding structure for something unforeseen was never there.

Its time to rethink what the NHS should provide. If the decision is 'everything' then the cost will be towards the infinite. Its painful choice but it has to be faced.

Cheers,

DV

as Drood says, if it's "infinity" then the preferred alternative of the Tory "we'll have a slice of that" government is "to infinity and beyond".

Sure we all need to pay more NI but it's only a small amount - provided the political parties make sure that the elite in society start contributing to the pot in the same way that the rest of us do.

Finally, it's not free now. there are numerous prescriptions that cost £6 which I can but more cheaply over here. I
 
As for the numbers, about a tenner a week on average according to Boris and his bus.
 
The NHS was created to provide free healthcare to all, regardless of wealth : what a fantastic step this was, Great Britain truly leading the world back in 1948. But that was 70 years ago.

I agree with DV , it's time for a radical rethink : the NHS is out of date.

Why should the NHS be free for all in the 21st century (it has after all become a "Free for all" in a negative sense) ?


I think the Dutch system is superior : if your income is above a median level, pay for health insurance. This is financially more manageable at a national level and fairer : the poor still receive free healthcare (via subsidised insurance) and why should, say, a disabled person receive free healthcare if (s)he is moderately wealthy ? It's quite ludicrous. Or look at it another way : why should someone who can afford to spend thousands on audio equipment receive free healthcare !?
 
[QUOTE="jtrade, post: 3247934, member: 8014"Or look at it another way : why should someone who can afford to spend thousands on audio equipment receive free healthcare !?[/QUOTE]

Well, the other side of the coin brings us back to this thread.

The system is meant to be funded by *progressive* taxation where the rich pay more to provide the cover for the poor - who they tend to suck their income from in the first place.

Playing the game of having the 'rich' use private health schemes/insurance simply gives them another way to get back money from having invested in them in a way the poor can't.

This is why allowing private companies to provide oursourcing, PFIs, etc, ends up being more costly... which is then duly blamed by the people bloodsucking the NHS on he NHS being 'inefficient and costly'.
 
The NHS was created to provide free healthcare to all, regardless of wealth : what a fantastic step this was, Great Britain truly leading the world back in 1948. But that was 70 years ago.

I agree with DV , it's time for a radical rethink : the NHS is out of date.

Why should the NHS be free for all in the 21st century (it has after all become a "Free for all" in a negative sense) ?


I think the Dutch system is superior : if your income is above a median level, pay for health insurance. This is financially more manageable at a national level and fairer : the poor still receive free healthcare (via subsidised insurance) and why should, say, a disabled person receive free healthcare if (s)he is moderately wealthy ? It's quite ludicrous. Or look at it another way : why should someone who can afford to spend thousands on audio equipment receive free healthcare !?
Because healthcare is fundamental - the sine qua non of living a decent life and contributing to society. Whether one receives it, *and its quality*, should not depend on one's abilty to pay.

I'm still waiting for someone to answer my question about how much tax rates would have to go up by to properly fund the NHS. Until we have that information, all talk of the NHS as we know it being unaffordable is just right-wing propaganda as far as I'm concerned.
 
Because healthcare is fundamental - the sine qua non of living a decent life and contributing to society. Whether one receives it, *and its quality*, should not depend on one's ability to pay.

The Dutch seem reasonably happy with their healthcare system : it's far more equitable, as everyone has health insurance whether they can pay for it or not, whereas in the UK most/many of those who can afford it, do indeed go private.

We led the way in 1948.... but no one in the Western world followed us, yet healthcare now appears superior and at least as accessible in many of the non-eastern EU countries.
 
The NHS was created to provide free healthcare to all, regardless of wealth : what a fantastic step this was, Great Britain truly leading the world back in 1948. But that was 70 years ago.

I agree with DV , it's time for a radical rethink : the NHS is out of date.

Why should the NHS be free for all in the 21st century (it has after all become a "Free for all" in a negative sense) ?


I think the Dutch system is superior : if your income is above a median level, pay for health insurance. This is financially more manageable at a national level and fairer : the poor still receive free healthcare (via subsidised insurance) and why should, say, a disabled person receive free healthcare if (s)he is moderately wealthy ? It's quite ludicrous. Or look at it another way : why should someone who can afford to spend thousands on audio equipment receive free healthcare !?

Because we are all equal when confronted with illness, injury and death.
Because a tax where some people contribute more than others without receiving anything in return is doomed to fail*.
Because a person making a good living shouldn't mind paying more tax than those who make very little.
Because we don't want to go back to the 19th century or end up with a US-style health system.

*what you describe is Step 1 of the manoeuvre. Step 2 is "why should I pay these taxes that don't bring me or my family anything?"
 
I'm still waiting for someone to answer my question about how much tax rates would have to go up by to properly fund the NHS.

I guess that's because 'properly fund the NHS' is such a vague term. The amount raised by each percentage rise in income tax should be relatively easy to calculate, but how much additional funding would be 'enough' is a bit more nuanced.
 
PsB - I appreciate your well-expressed view, but I'm talking about going forward to an equitable system that appears to actually work...
 
Just to be clear: I'm not saying the NHS system is the best or the only way forward. I have enjoyed the benefits of health systems in various other European countries, which don't have the monopoly/free at point of use aspect of the NHS. They work very well especially if you're employed (better than the NHS in some aspects because you get more choice), and there are various safety nets for those who are unemployed/retired etc. What they all have in common is they cost more than the NHS. I've also experienced the US system on several occasions, and that is the one system that I really, really dislike, because of the astronomical costs for mediocre outcomes (see the graph in the Wikipedia article I just linked to), and the cruelty of making health care income dependent for so many groups of people.
 
exactly PsB,

it works perfectly well and is the envy of the world if hm government fund it correctly. So change bandings for NI and do that instead of selling it off to large multinationals who will bleed your children and grandchildren dry.
 
I guess that's because 'properly fund the NHS' is such a vague term. The amount raised by each percentage rise in income tax should be relatively easy to calculate, but how much additional funding would be 'enough' is a bit more nuanced.
I know. My point was a rhetorical counter to the "demand for healthcare is potentially infinite" meme.

To unpack it a little, there's a point of detail: by exactly how much is demand growing (and by how much is it forecast to grow)? How might it be constrained by choosing not to treat non life threatening conditions? How would demand shift long term if the NHS prioritised prevention rather than treatment (which would require, eg, tackling the powerful food lobby head on, as the tobacco lobby have been tackled previously)? Or if the interface between healthcare and adult social care was better managed? And then, for each scenario, what are the tax implications of funding it?

Then there's the point of principle, which PsB has eloquently expressed: health is fundamental so everyone, regardless of their income, should have equal access to consistently good healthcare. Right wing Jeremiahs aside, I see no evidence that this is "unaffordable" in what is the world's 5th (6th... 7th...?) largest economy. Where there's a political will there's a way but the Tories lack the political will to make the NHS work.
 
I'm still waiting for someone to answer my question about how much tax rates would have to go up by to properly fund the NHS. Until we have that information, all talk of the NHS as we know it being unaffordable is just right-wing propaganda as far as I'm concerned.

The answer actually depends on some factors almost no-one mentions or realises could be taken into account. People have realised that using private companies to 'outsource', etc, generally ends up degrading the performance/cost over time. The last decade or two now makes that pretty clear. But they overlook factors which are treated as 'external'.

For me the big 'invisible elephant' in the room is the behaviour of the drugs companies. Again, people now know from the writings of Ben Goldacre how they game and manipulate regulation. What isn't so well known or widely understood is the gross inefficiency in the way they do research and development.

Consider for example the way they say r-and-d is expensive because they have to test thousands of possible compounds. In itself true enough. But then notice that they keep confidential all the 'fail' results for 'commercial' reasons and think about that.

Yes, from the POV of a company it makes commercial sense to ensure that any potential competitor has to *also* spend a similar amount trudging through much the same large library of 'possibly useful' compounds in order to dismiss almost all of them.

But from our POV it means paying the same costs over and over again when we buy their successful finds, subsidising in that price the same monkey-motion 'fail' tests being done over and over and over and over...

Contrarywise, if all results *had* to be published, every company could benefit from the work the others had done, and the costs to us would actually fall. The whole process of finding new treatments and drugs would be faster and cheaper *for the NHS*.

Note that in general when the companies employ academics they limit what they can publish. Which is contrary to the usual presumption that we have universities for the public benefit and academics succeed on the basis of publishing their work.

Yet the UK Government has often trumpted what a great 'success' it is to have large drugs companies based in the UK. Go figger... :)
 
People interested in this thread may find reading the new issue of Private Eye informative. I got my copy this morning and the first paras in the issue are along the lines of

"It was no surprise Theresa May's response to the Paradise Papers was so tepid...

Unremarked on so far is the use of offshore law firm Appleby by Capital Group, the private equity business in which the PM's husband Philip May is a senior figure. Emails show the firm's major Cayman Islands funds, limited partnerships known as..."

'In The Back' also looks worth a read.
 


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