The Cost of the NHS

A report today finally reveals the financial drain on UK resources the NHS actually is.

An eye-watering £2000 per household is needed annually in increased tax to fully fund the NHS. It shows the cost of the NHS would become unacceptable.

If this doesn't sparks a long-needed great debate on what the NHS is for and the things it can do and the things that are out of it's reach then nothing will.

I've long said the NHS is over-reaching in certain areas. For instance cancer treatment, where phenomenally expensive drugs are being used to prolong the lives of terminally ill patients. Note this is not cure: this is eeeking out the life of someone for a couple of months at a cost that can reach tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds for the more exotic drugs.

To me this is not something the NHS should be spending money on. As sad as it is that the people have cancer, it is right that they are getting tens of thousands of pounds to prolong a life that is already terminal for a couple of months instead of using that money to cure or repair an illness?

For instance that could fund several hip and knee replacements, totally transforming the life of a person for decades.

My own personal opinion in that situation is that I would not take the treatment for the greater good of others.

Being such a huge consumer of health products should surely enable the NHS to strike deals with suupliers? Given the vast consumption across the country a national procurement department should be able to negotiate better/cheaper supply of item the NHS requires.

Don't forget the endless lawsuits that the NHS has to settle because of negligence claims. They slurp up almost half the NHS budget. Doing things better with fewer mistakes will gain the NHS a huge portion of the busdget that should go towards care instead of lawyers.

Forget privitisation, because in the long run that increases costs. But there is more to be done to leverage the size of the NHS against the costs the global corporations want to slap on it. Any purchasing manager worth their salt should be able to do a better deal given tha size of their health authority. I say should, but many don't. That needs to change.

As does the mentality that the NHS can rely on an ever-expanding purse and bottomless pockets. There will come a time when the public will start to question the expense.

Inequality of Vehicle Excise Duty

I'm currently looking to buy a replacement car. Note I don't say a new car, because I can't afford one.

Having a boat (therefore wanting a huge boot for lugging stuff around) and wanting a bit of comfort I was looking a at 15-year-old Lexus 4x4. The RX300 is a cut-price cruiser, it does everything and is available at the sort of year I'm looking at relatively cheaply. My budget being around £2000. It also is a 4x4 so has chunky tyres that ironically cope better with the potholes that our Vehicle Excise Duty fails to be spent on year-on-year.

Hoever, looking at Vehilce Excise Duty (VED) for the car, it's an eye-watering £582 a year. A whole quarter of the cost of buying the car. Every year.

Now my Volvop V70 2.4 litre Swedish tank, being made in 1999 and pre-emissions VED, means I onlt pay £180 a year for VED. My current car has 291,000 miles on the clock, is leaking oil into the bores and burning it in a haze of blue. You'd think I would be encouraged by the government to chop it in and avoid adding to the haze of hydrocarbons that surround Portsmouth.

£400 difference is a pretty big dissuader. But it got me thinking:

Why does VED no taper off after so many years? I can understand that a brand new Range Rover has a huge VED bill and because that bill is a fraction of the cost of the vehicle, most people would pay it.

But as the vehicle becomes older,. the VED cost becomes a substantial proportion of the cost of the vehicle. A big cooling factor when buying the vehicle.

The environmentalists would raise a cheer, because that means the vehicle become uneconomic and ends up on the scrapheap sooner. But hang on, that perfectly serviceable vehicle is being scrapped not because it is at the end of it's life, but because of some arbitrary ecomonic price attached to ownership.

That makes no environmental sense. Once the vehicle is scrapped, the envirionmental cost of making a new vehicle to replace it is several years worth of CO2 had the vehicle carried on running.

So why does VED not taper off as the vehicle becomes older? That way there's an acknowlegment that the environmental cost of changing the vehicle is higher than keeping it on the road.

It also recognises the fact that poorer people will buy older cars, people that cannot afford a brand new Range Rover, but would quite like to drive an older model and do what is necessary to keep it on the road.

VED is used as a tool of jealousy, milking the rich that can afford to pay the price, and keeping the poor people that can't afford to pay the price of running an older model once it becomes affordable.

Yet another way that the elite keep the poor down. The "I can afford it but you can't" mentality shoved right in your face coated in environmentalism.

Labour Lose compared to Expectations in Local Elections (trying hard not to laugh edition).

I'll say it until I'm blue in the face, a buch of Chealsea Trots at the head of the Labour party will not get them any traction other than within Severely Socialist areas like in London and Liverpool.

Now it seems the Chelsea Trot set's predictions of massive gains has backfired and they have failed to make the gains they predicted.

All this socialist worker guff they keep spouting needs to stop. It has no relevance and no traction with the wider Labour-voting electrorate.

On Question Time,. the usual Labour guff about building more affordable homes was trotted out. The problem with building homes on that sort of level has to be governemnt-funded, the private sector can't and won't do it on their own.

So who pays for all these affordable homes? They are not self-financing.

To be honest any future Labour government would be mired in lawsuits from the owner's of the utilities they plan to steal back according to John McDonnell that they wouldn't be able to do much of anything else.

The other think to square is the number of homes that would go into negative equity if house prices drop substantially.  That affects those paying mortgages over and above the value of their home and also the banks, that lose substantial assets in the form of all these mortgages and homes.

So how does the government intend to compenste the parties affected by a government entering a massive house building scheme and crashing house prices?

Anyhoo, back to Labour's piss-poor performance last night. And be under no illusion, it was piss-poor given the own-goal the apparently disfunctional Tories appeared to donate.

Of course it's not the trots that have lost Labour seats, it's Brexit... Yes, Corbyn's lack of leadership on Brexit is a factor, but his lack of leadership on ANYTHING from Brexit, Hamas, Israel, to anti-Semetism, to Russian Spies and every other thing a Labour leader should have an opinion and provide leadership on. I've not headr the word spineless used regarding Corbyn for some reason, I expct because of his vindictive streak. But for fuck's sake, when you watch him, you really want him to come down off that fucking fence he likes to sit on. Great policy for a back bencher, but he's there up front at the sharp end, supposedly stating policy in a clear an concise manner. He's not supposed to look like Mr Bean's dad mistakenly got promoted to lead a political party. Jesus, he even makes Boris Johnson, the arch-prevaricator look concise and focussed.

Anyway, I do like it when I'm proved right.

According to most decent non-anarchist, non-trotskyite Labour voter, "Labour can go fuck themselves if they think I'm going to vote for them with that lot in charge""

And so the wounded, weak Conservative party get to limp on, with no-one around to on the opposition side able to deliver the coup-de-grace.

Makes you weep.