Need the NHS suffer because of public spending cuts

One of the big news items today was a claim that the government’s spending cuts would hit NHS front line services.
From BBC News
Government spending cuts will stretch the NHS and social care services in England to the limit, according to a report by the Commons Health Select Committee. The committe of MPs say the plans assume efficiency savings on a scale never before seen in the NHS, or in other countries. Steven Dorrell, chair of the committee, said the NHS had to save 4% per annum for four years – a “huge target”.

Read John de Roe in the Daily Stirrer on how we can make savings on the bnloated NHS budget without sacrificing essential clinical care.
Government Spending Cuts Hit NHS

Flu Deaths Soar To Fifty This Winter – 1/60th of annual average

The Dementia time bomb

Litle Nicky may have a young outlook but let’s be honest I’m no chicken. This issue is of some interest to me them.

The Daily Stirrer has warned many times of the various time bombs that are ticking in the basement of our bloated society. Forget climate change, it was a diversion, a phishing expedition by scientists and bureaucrats to see how much money they could persuade gullible and fear driven politicians to pump into expensive vanity projects the aim of which was not to save the planet but to win Nobel Prizes and other prestigious awards and “secure a place in history.”

Climate change is a problem but it is not our biggest nor our most urgent.

The biggest problem is overpopulation, solve that and the climate will take care of itself.

Next on the list is ageing. Medical science expects to be thanked for curing or controlling many potentially fatal conditions enabling us to live longer. Unfortunately they have not cracked the problem of age induced infirmity. The burden of caring for the elderly infirm is straining the social infrastructure of developed societies.

from The Daily Telegraph
The £388 billion cost includes that of social care, unpaid care by relatives and the medical bills for treating dementia.

The figure is expected to rise rapidly in the coming years but governments are woefully unprepared to meet the challenge, said the World Alzheimer Report 2010.

Experts at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and King’s College London examined the cost of dementia care and found that, if it was a country, it would be the world’s 18th biggest economy.

And if it was a company, it would be the world’s biggest by annual revenue, way above Wal-Mart (£265.6 billion) and Exxon Mobil (£200 billion).

Campaigners already warned that the costs of caring for people with dementia are on the rise, mostly due to people living longer.

The number of people with dementia will … read more
A HREF=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8015078/Global-cost-of-dementia-almost-400bn.html”>Dementia Costs Equal 1% Of World EconomyIn the UK at the moment according to figures quoted in a BBC documentary, The Young Ones, last week one in five of people over seventy needs either full time or part time care. In the 1980s and 90s the elderly infirm, those not able to live independently, were moved to municipal care homes. These were impersonal and bureaucratic so eventually the emphasis was shifted to one on once care in the home. While better for individuals this was enormously expensive for the taxpayers and also distorted the state of the employment situation by vastly expanding the proportion of people employed by the state as against those working in true revenue generating industries.

The nineteenth century social reformer William Cobbett referred in his writing to tax eaters. It is an appelation we would do well to reclaim. Reducing unemployment by appointing vast numbers of tax eaters. To do that is to merely massage the statistics. We are left then with a conundrum for the science lovers to choke on. How do we now stop people living so long they become a burden on society? Or more to the point what is being done to ensure that as people live longer they do not become a burden on society? If half the population are over a million years old and the other half are busy caring for them who is going to grow food, build houses, make machines etc.

Euthanasia is not going to play well with the voters so the only alternative is rather that governments continuing to promote a dependency culture to return to a social system in which people are not given unrealistic expectations.

As humanist philosopher David Hume said: It is better to die at sixty – five while in command of one’s faculties that have a few more years of increasing infirmity.

more on David Hume’s life and philosophy

Listen carefully to the climate change alarmists, pay the same kind of forensic attention to the virus alarmists, the terror alarmists and all the rest. Their scaremongering is always full of might and possibly and could and maybe. Their predictions are based on mathematical models not reality.

The age time bomb is with is now and it is ticking away under the chair on which you are sitting.

The Daily Stirrer
Doctors traing to include making patients conform to stereotypesTheosophy For Beginners

Three Bees Sting The Old.

It had to happen. In spite of our generosity we punters could not keep underwriting the follies of capitalism and free market economics for ever simply by infinitely increasing our personal debts. Everything is finite, except perhaps the Universe, the mendacity of politicians and the greed of free market capitalists.

Over the past six months everybody has become painfully aware that the good times are gone. The three Bees, Blatcherism, Bureaucracy and Bean – counting have been stirred up and are stinging with a vengeance.

First to be hit were the poor, but now the old are starting to suffer. A social care crisis has been brewing for as long as the climate change crisis and has been as assiduously swept under the carpet. Politicians could not see many votes to be had from the old and capitalists could see easier ways of making money from old age than by providing high – cost, low return care homes (simpler by far to create fraudulent investment vehicles and steal people’s life savings)

Solutions to the growing problem of old age all seem to involve raising taxes or the abandonment of balls out foreign policy initiatives like The War or expensive vanity projects the The Games.

Making up a threesome along with the failure of capitalism and neo-con politics is the failure of modern medicine. While advances in drugs, surgery and other therapies have succeeded in prolonging life by finding ways to downgrade killer diseases to merely nasty, debilitating diseases we do not hear much about successes in prolonging the healthy, active portion of life. The medics have extended our lifespan but failed to combat the infirmities of age.

Another factor is the way successive governments of the Tory right and the Labour right have pandered to the demands of the business community, allowing them the freedom to export proper jobs to low labour cost economies. This has resulted in a disproportionate number of our workers being employed in candy-floss industries or in public administration. While the work of those who actually deliver a service in health and social care, transport, education, environmental services and public order is always costed to the penny and very tight budget restrictions imposed, the budgets for administering these services seems to be open ended.

We would expect nothing else as the administration of public services is now outsourced to the private sector and the only growth industry is in the creation of middle men, all wanting a piece of the action without actually doing anything practical to earn it.

This is why in a Blatcherite world there is never enough money to hire more doctors, nurses and teachers, but funds are always available for more bureaucrats and bean counters. It puts all that guff about enterprise in perspective.

Cluedo: It Was Gordon Brown In The Surgery With A Spreadsheet.

Not so long ago Machiavelli commented on the planned closures of A & E units and specialist children’s facilities as part of the Governments drove to “make the NHS more efficient and give patients more choice.” We thought nothing the Department of Health And Bean Counting could do would leave us more gobsmacked than a blatant attack on sick children.
Now we learn that in the interests of efficiency (i.e. saving a few quid) people recovering from major operations will not routinely have follow up appointments with the consultants who treated them but will be referred to their G.P.s
Its true that many follow up appointments are routine and do not require the involvement of a consultant. This is why (and I speak from experience) most follow up appointments at hospitals are conducted by registrars and junior doctors.
While not having attained the highest level these doctors will be specialists in their field and will have daily briefings with their supervisors during which concerns can be raised.
Can we really believe that a G.P. no matter how competent and committed can deal with orthopaedic, cardio-vascular, neurological and oncological cases all in the same day. And if that were realistic, are G.Ps not under enough pressure already from the workload imposed by ever more demanding patients and an implacable bureaucracy?
The Government counters all logical arguments by citing cost, efficiency and “the widening of patients choice” as its justifications. What is really going on however is the withdrawal of an important layer of patient care and an important learning process from the next generation of doctors.
And this LABOUR government has the gall to tell us they are doing us a favour by making it possible for us to choose in which dirty, cash strapped hospital we get third rate care from inadequately trained staff. We will probably never be able to prove how many deaths will result from this shoddy exercise in short – termism and bean counting but if any are identified we all know who will be to blame don’t we?
The most scary thing of all about it is thirty per cent of the electorate would still vote for them.