Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2019 3:44 pm
I don't know man. I would have agreed with you not that long ago. But a bit of digging reveals a lot of bullshit going around. (e.g. a third of adult Americans didn't have access to healthcare because of cost...the UK is the world's best provider of healthcare not tied to wealth, record numbers of Americans are going broke paying for healthcare)
These are bullshit claims, and they are everywhere.
What about the inequalities in healthcare provision for people with severe mental illness
What about the horrible healthcare provided to the elderly in the UK
Or the near impossibility of seeing a specialist unless you're fucking dying in the Netherregions
--these are probably all bullshit claims too...maybe not?
:haironfuckingfire:
So when it comes to what is or isn't controversial regarding healthcare and systems that are working I'm going to be a bit more skeptical going forward.
I totally understand that, and also have some serious concerns about both the rose-tinted or shit-stinking assertions that are so often bandied about. I'd agree that mental health provision in the UK is, at best, patchy, and as a service has been reduced to a facility for managing crisis events. Social care for the elderly has it's own problems, which are at once demographic, structural and resourced-based, and children's social care services are also under a lot of similar pressures. On the other hand, if you receive a cancer diagnosis you are pretty much guaranteed to be seen by a specialist within required 4 weeks and to undertake treatment within 4 weeks of that appointment.
The government say that we are spending more on health and social care services as a percentage of GDP than ever before, and
looking at the books shows that this is indeed the case. But what these figures do not reflect is the massive restructuring of health and social care service which the last three Tory governments have undertaken since they were elected under David Cameron in 2010.
As you might remember I used to work in NHS admin, and I could bang on about these issues for ages -- don't get me started! -- but I think my previous point, about access and cost, do offer an interesting and relevant point of comparison - particularly as the UK has moved further towards a system where providers charged with statutory obligations are forced to outsource a range of service to the lowest-bidder in the private sector in circumstances where the resource allocation of those private concers are placed outside the realm of public scrutiny on the basis of so-called 'commercial confidentiality'. What we do know about those 'delivery partners' though is that they are paying less people lower wages while posting increasing profits - following a long-standing Tory model of turning public funds into private profits.
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