There have been a variety of scary headlines in the press about the dire state of the Health Service. With the BBC and some of the papers, this means the Engish Health Service, as largely the BBC don’t make distinctions and papers that don’t bother, or don’t bother much, with Scottish Editions are the same.
Overcrowded corridors full of patients on trollies waiting for beds; all non-emergency operations cancelled; beds blocked by elderly or convalescent patients because they have nowhere to go; doctors on strike…
So, we see that since 2009, when the bankers broke the country and were punished by the removal of a knighthood, the percentage of GDP spent on the NHS has dropped with a small exception of 2016, and is set to drop again until 2020 and a general election.
For UK, read England and consequential for other nations.
The UK seems to come somewhere about the middle of the range for spend as a percentage of GDP, on around the same level as Finland, Slovenia, Iceland, Australia, but lower than Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and France. (These are 2013 figures and the first table shows that the spend is likely to drop. However, given that the GDP may well also drop, the question is will the percentage stay the same?) The disparity in % between the tables is likely to accounted for by the second table including private healthcare.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Notice that the USA spends far more but there is a large swathe of the population which has no health care coverage at all.
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Yes. Although I’m not sure how that is working out now with Obamacare. Certainly a few years ago I had a mate who worked for a small company that couldn’t afford to pay his insurance as part of his pay deal. he simply had no insurance. Fortunately he was/is young and healthy, but jeez, what a terrible way for a modern country to operate.
If anything happened to him he would have been completely stuffed.
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Why surely you are not suggesting that health outcomes and health expenditure are not directly in correlation? But how will the Truth Ministry be able to make any news programmes if they cannot manipulate statistics to show that SNP baad?
In Germany people are required to take out health insurance.
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As I recall, in France, people pay insurance for the % of health costs not provided by the state. Old and young, unemployed or chronically sick get 100% coverage. Hospital care is on the Heath Service.
Clearly the SNP has failed the Scottish people becasue, well, that’s what they are genetically programmed to do, they are bad, bad I tell you. BAAAAAAD!!!!!!!! BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD
(Pause while they take their pills.
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Also worrying to viewers of a different country (England) as barcodes are to be introduced. It’s a slippery slope towards privatisation with that ability to barcode set in train. Weasely words used such as “efficiency”…
Private hospitals, by necessity, need to scan to send bills to folk!
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Good heavens. I hope they aren’t going to be toting up how much you’ve cost them in a year?
I think it will be privatised. They certainly won;t be able to afford it if people keep getting older and living longer. Once privatised it will be like care homes were when they privatised them. Dire, and VERY expensive.
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Do people in the USA live longer and healthier than the rest of the world?
Probably not.
So…..
The vast sums of money they clearly spend on private health care is not being targeted where it should be i.e. patient care and not profits and inflated salaries.
I will be surprised if ObamaCare survives a Trump administration given the hostility of the political right to publicly funded enterprises and the historic claims they have made about “diluting” health care by making it freely available to the plebs.
On this side of the pond,the Trumpites are heading down the same road with the process being accelerated post Brexit.
The only health they care about is their own.
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I’ve seen some of the bills for minor matters in the USA. They are massive. Even an X-ray:
http://health.costhelper.com/x-rays.html
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