Healthcare. Is this he thin edge of the wedge?

Doodledog

Septimia

I've long thought that those who can afford it should pay for their 'bed and board' when in hospital. Not at 5* hotel rates, of course, but it would help offset the overall cost.

As you say Blossoming, how will they define 'wealthy'?

But how do you define the ‘those who can afford it’ that you think should pay?

If ‘afford it’ means that feed would leave you with millions in the bank, then ok. if it means using the rent on a house you don’t live in, I would consider that as maybe reasonable, but if it means that if you sell everything you will have just enough left to scrape by, then I would disagree. The devil is in the detail, as usual.

But I don't think many landlords would be prepared to give a refund for a few days or a couple of weeks.

The NHS is becoming the pauper’s service.

foxie48

I'm certainly not rich but would happily pay something towards any treatment that I get from the NHS if it helped to improve the service for everyone. I get free prescriptions because I'm a pensioner but again would be willing to pay the annual charge if asked. I'm aware that many of us are concerned about "privatisation" of the NHS but I feel we should be looking at all possibilities if we want to improve things. The NHS already uses and pays for private hospital provision, eg I had an MRI at a private hospital, if it helps to shorten waiting times and get people the treatment they need, then why not? I think there may be lots of elective treatments that could be done more efficiently in bespoke units ie that is all they do, but that's difficult to achieve in most NHS hospitals .

MRIs are a bit of a money-making scam.
I've had three of them over the last few months.
When I was waiting for one of them, I heard the radiographer on the phone to admin.
A private patient was waiting for an MRI (presumably having jumped the queue because this was an NHS hospital). The patient couldn't have the scan because the private insurance company wouldn't pay up unless she had a cheaper ultrasound first.
The radiographer went off to tell the lady in the cubicle what was happening. Obviously, she was very upset, but had no choice except to go back to her private consultant to book an ultrasound.
I was extremely grateful I was an NHS patient because I had a number of ultrasounds and MRIs and they all went smoothly and without delay.

Urmstongran

Actually not a bad idea to charge for food whilst in hospital! Even a nominal sum of £1 a day would help the coffers as in-patients would be eating at home anyway. Probably get told now it would be too bureaucratic. Seems most ideas seem to get labelled that way these days.

DH wasn't eating for a week, then when he could he said he couldn't eat the awful hospital food.
Certainly he'd lost a lot of weight when he came home.

Perhaps we need James Martin to start another campaign?

annsixty

People in Wales also get free prescriptions or they did when we had a caravan there.
Everybody who can pay should.
My S’s script this week cost £37 and the surgery only now give monthly prescriptions instead of two as they did until a few months ago.

Yes, we do.

I heard last week that Wales is thinking of reintroducing parking charges at hospitals.

paddyann54

URM You must go searching for anti Scottish govt stuff.
I'm a member of SNP ,get all the current or preliminary discussion on actions to be taken and I haven't heard of this.On the contrary I did hear the FM saying/promising that the NHS would always be available for all here .
The Scottish NHS figures are the best in the UK .unless you read the unionist press.Staff are better paid ,eye and dental checks are Free ,catching all sorts of illness that could be serious and cost a fortune IF they went undiscovered simply because folk couldn't afford them .
Our budget has been cut by 5 BILLION but the nurses received an offer of between 5.4% and 11.1 in recent negotiations ...thats after the 3% they were awarded last year .
Please pay attention to the MESS your government is making of the WHOLE UK .Believe me from what I hear from relatives from Southport to Devon things are much much worse down there .
A wee ps,I saw my GP last week ,by the time I had left the surgery she had organised a brain scan later the same day ,she has called me every day since to check my BP figures and I'm seeing her again tomorrow .Is YOUR nhs better than that ?

Oh yes all is fine and dandy in Scotland hey? That’s why so many Scottish people leave there to live somewhere else.
In fact you don’t have to search for anti Scottish government stuff, there is plenty out there including newspapers.
This wasn’t really anti anything anyway, it was in the paper and leaked.Think tank stuff which surely won’t happen anyway as it’s a vote loser.

Callistemon it all depends which hospital, visited a friend recently who had a two week hospital stay in England, and she said the food was lovely and wished she had more appetite.

But I don't think many landlords would be prepared to give a refund for a few days or a couple of weeks.
No, I meant that if someone was renting out a house they don’t live in. Not the best example maybe but I was thinking quickly about an example of ‘spare’ money that people might have, between real wealth and ordinary people’s ‘rainy day’ funds that so many seem to resent anyone wanting to hang onto.

annsixty If your son is on regular monthly meds, then he should get a prescription prepayment certificate. You get three and 12 monthly ones, look at the NHS website for details.

Urmstongran

NHS chiefs discuss charging wealthy patients for care in Scotland. (Headline just now in the Telegraph).
“'Damning' leaked minutes reveal talks on adopting a 'two-tier' system to help plug 'billion-pound hole' in the budget”

Even to have the topic on the agenda seems shocking.
Is this the future do we think?

Do I think that a true 2-tier system is in future?

No, 2-tier medical care has been normalised for quite some time.

I seem to remember my Granny had to hand in her pension book to the hospital once she had been in hospital six(?) Weeks. Anybody else remember something similar? Also, if a payment was introduced for the 'wealthy' what's the betting a whole new level of admin would be introduced to manage this? That's my reckoning.......

Your state pension doesn’t stop when you’re in hospital, but after 28 days you no longer get attendance allowance, disability living allowance, and I think a few other discretionary payments.
It’s a good point about collection systems for any payments, they would cause another layer of bureaucracy, there is no other way of doing it - and there would need to be systems for non payers, and those who couldn’t pay. Imagine not feeding people in hospital because they had no money. I don’t think that’s the way to go, people should be taxed at source so the NHS is free at point of delivery.

The cost of running a system to collect £1 a day for food would cost more to run than it would bring in. A minimum charge of £5 a day would need to be the bottom line.

I am not advocating it, in fact I oppose it, but I am looking at it it purely from the administrative point of view.

Whitewavemark2

It isn’t the NHS if you are paying. The principle of “free at the point of use” is broken.

Yes, quite.

Attached is a response from one Prof Kerr. Hope it's legible. It says who he is in the blurb before what he's quoted as saying.

Growstuff In what way are MRIs a money making scam? A CT scan may be cheaper but not if it needs to be followed up with an MRI, which I understand is better as showing certain types of injury or cancer.

Kim19

I seem to remember my Granny had to hand in her pension book to the hospital once she had been in hospital six(?) Weeks. Anybody else remember something similar? Also, if a payment was introduced for the 'wealthy' what's the betting a whole new level of admin would be introduced to manage this? That's my reckoning.......

Yes, I remember that too, or do we have faulty memories?

M0nica

The cost of running a system to collect £1 a day for food would cost more to run than it would bring in. A minimum charge of £5 a day would need to be the bottom line.

I am not advocating it, in fact I oppose it, but I am looking at it it purely from the administrative point of view.

True.
And how would it work if a patient is Nil by Mouth, on a drip for nutrition if they are unable to eat, on a ventilator in ICU etc?

It is unworkable.

The food waste must be huge, though.

We were in A&E recently; because the wait is so long (days in a few cases) a trolley came round with food, sandwiches, tea, orange juice, biscuits, for patients only. So anyone accompanying a patient went hungry as there were few facilities for anything except a vending machine with crisps, chocolate bars and soft drinks.

foxie48

Growstuff In what way are MRIs a money making scam? A CT scan may be cheaper but not if it needs to be followed up with an MRI, which I understand is better as showing certain types of injury or cancer.

It was a money-making scam for the lady in the waiting room who was booked in for an MRI. It was in the Breast Unit and MRIs aren't usually necessary to diagnose breast cancer. A mammogram followed by an ultra-sound (which is what the insurance company would pay for) and biopsy are enough.

I needed MRIs because I had lobular cancer, which is quite rare and doesn't form the classic lumps and one of the cancers was very small.

My OH paid for a private MRI scan on his knee, which told him exactly the same as the GP had done.

Kim19

I seem to remember my Granny had to hand in her pension book to the hospital once she had been in hospital six(?) Weeks. Anybody else remember something similar? Also, if a payment was introduced for the 'wealthy' what's the betting a whole new level of admin would be introduced to manage this? That's my reckoning.......

Yes.
We had to help with her rent etc!

Most of the pension used to be stopped after you had been in hospital 6 weeks, anyone under pension age would have any benefits they were getting stopped after six weeks. It was meant to be to stop you being paid twice by the state for your support, pension benefits and being housed fed etc by the taxpayer through the NHS. I suspect the thinking was, that if you had been in hospital six weeks, you were unlikely to return home anyway - and I am sure that was probably true in the early days of the NHS.

Currently Attendance Allowance and other disability benefits will stop after 28 days, I think. Here is a link to the rules
www.turn2us.org.uk/Benefit-guides/Going-into-Hospital-and-benefits/Benefits-that-stop-being-paid-if-you-go-into-hospi

Growstuff I can't help thinking that over hearing a telephone conversation whilst waiting for treatment and your OH having your GP's diagnosis confirmed with a privately funded MRI constitutes a scam, but you are entitled to your opinion. My point is that using private medical facilities to enable people to be treated more quickly can save the NHS money and most importantly, improve the quality of their lives. If it puts some money into shareholders pockets, I can live with that more easily then making sick and injured people wait until the NHS can provide the treatment they need. Using spare capacity in private facilities to reduce waiting lists seems completely sensible to me.

From MSM's Fact Check today:

The 'NHS Leak' story being pushed by BBC Scotland today is a virtual carbon copy of an anti-SNP smear the broadcaster ran two days before the 2014 Indyref. Here's the news report from 2014 followed by today's story. It's literally the same tactic, even down to the wording.

The NHS is not free, it never has been, but the NI contributions that were supposed to fund it have never been ring fenced, and modern treatments and drugs are so expensive that some form of rationing is needed (and indeed being brought in, no hip replacements for the obese etc) or we will have to go down the route of extra health insurance to top it up.

As mentioned above, the last thing the NHS needs is yet another layer of administration to manage contributions towards hospital food.

foxie48

Growstuff I can't help thinking that over hearing a telephone conversation whilst waiting for treatment and your OH having your GP's diagnosis confirmed with a privately funded MRI constitutes a scam, but you are entitled to your opinion. My point is that using private medical facilities to enable people to be treated more quickly can save the NHS money and most importantly, improve the quality of their lives. If it puts some money into shareholders pockets, I can live with that more easily then making sick and injured people wait until the NHS can provide the treatment they need. Using spare capacity in private facilities to reduce waiting lists seems completely sensible to me.

But it doesn't save the NHS money because there is a limit to the number of staff available, nor does it reduce waiting lists. If staff are working privately, they can't work for the NHS at the same time. It's queue jumping for those who can afford it and just means NHS patients have to wait longer.

That logic is flawed though growstuff because you’re assuming that staff who currently work partly privately would opt to work wholly for the NHS. They wouldn’t. A parallel wholly private system would operate, and many would choose to work wholly privately. There will never not be a private system for those who can afford it.