Gotta Suck being old in the UK

Originally posted by Eladar
Did you read the article?

Why won't you answer the question?

Yes, I did read the article, and it does not support your view that old people are routinely denied treatment on the basis of age alone. It points to some regional variances in some treatment rates.

The Daily Telegraph has the highest age demographic of any national newspaper in the UK, so scare stories which appeal to this demographic by isolating a few statistics and then drawing unsubstantiated opinions about the causes of them is ten a penny. This doesn't mean that there isn't an issue here, but you have extrapolated from these already wild assertions to make your own patently absurd ones.

No GP or other medical practitioner in the NHS I have met would deny someone treatment simply because they are old. It goes against everything they joined the NHS for.

It is also illegal.

I take it from your refusal to answer that you have never lived in the UK, know of no people in the UK over the age of 75 currently undergoing treatment on the NHS, know of no people who have been refused treatment on the basis of their age, and indeed have no practical experience or knowledge of the NHS at all.

But you can apparently make the claim that the NHS does not care about old people based on a single article in a newspaper which has a clear commercial agenda and that does not even support the claim you are making.

Originally posted by Rank outsider
Why won't you answer the question?

Yes, I did read the article, and it does not support your view that old people are routinely denied treatment on the basis of age alone. It points to some regional variances in some treatment rates.

The Daily Telegraph has the highest age demographic of any national newspaper in the UK, so scare stories which a ...[text shortened]... per which has a clear commercial agenda and that does not even support the claim you are making.

Excellent post.

Interesting to notice the NHS specifically targeting over 70s in its campaign on breast cancer awareness, encouraging older people to check and go to their GP if they have any concerns. eg http://www.nhs.uk/be-clear-on-cancer/breast-cancer/symptoms

At the same time, we have to be aware that the 2010 NHS reorganization under Andrew Lansley was so intensely unpopular that the last government got rid of - Andrew Lansley, but kept the restructure. As James Meek noted in his book Private Island, it is perfectly possible for the Conservatives to praise the NHS to the skies, pledge to retain the NHS in all its wonder and at the same time legislate it out of existence. That is what they are doing. Referring to whirling cycles of restructures, he said "Truly it is impossible to step into the same NHS twice."

Now that hospitals (and specific specialisms within them) have to operate as competitive commercial units, with nationally defined price lists, there are many procedures with a perverse incentive to evade giving treatment. When a hospital in Stafford was exposed for providing scandalous levels of care, what was revealed was that this hopital, unlike most others, had totally implemented the managerial requirements imposed on them, and thus demonstrated that the only reason we still have a decent NHS is that its managers are holding out for traditional values that are becoming unsustainable. This is why so many NHS trusts are in debt and getting deeper in debt. (This and the delayed impact of Private Finance Initiative of course). But under the new rules, they can and some will go bankrupt and the government will then be able to dismantle them, while claiming they were mismanaged.

Of course that happened in the competitive regime under the old New Labour (neoliberal) regime. The subsequent careers of the responsible New Labour ministers is eye popping. Alan Milburne - Bridgepoint Capital - a venture capital company advising healthcare companies in Britian. Patricia Hewitt: Cinvern - which owns 37 private hospitals. Simon Stevens, Tony Blair's special adviser, moved to UnitedHealth, one of America's largest private health companies, before returning to the payroll of NHS England. Mark Britnell, one of the most senior civil servants in the Department of Health, joined KPMG. In a 2010 interview, Britnell said: "In future the NHS will be a state insurance provider, not a state deliverer... The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years." He also said "Competition can't exist without privatisation."

So in conclusion, the success of the state operated NHS has been brought to a conclusion, The cheapest (buraucracy? The US spends over 33% of its inflated healths pending on administration!) and one of the best health services in the world is now in the hands of a neo liberal government committed to markets and competition, and not without a hand in the relevant pockets.

I really don't get what the whole discussion is about. In Zambia, you are considered lucky if you get past 40.
Back in 1994, my then employer celebrated at 40 because he was about to reach the countries life expectancy.

Since so many people died off, the life expectancy has since improved:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=zambia%20life%20expectancy

Originally posted by Wajoma
KN thinks he is helping us out by defining 'false dichotomy'.

WE KNOW ALREADY.

It's not a false dichotomy when I am referring to your support of a ban on hospitals.

Yes, I did read the article, and it does not support your view that old people are routinely denied treatment on the basis of age alone. It points to some regional variances in some treatment rates.

Go back the read the quote I gave in the original post.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
It's not a false dichotomy when I am referring to your support of a ban on hospitals.

Troll boy, please quote me on that so I can address your trolling.

...but that's not what trolls do eh.

Originally posted by Wajoma
Troll boy, please quote me on that so I can address your trolling.

...but that's not what trolls do eh.

You can find it in the thread "The REAL welfare queens," on page 9 (as well as many others places, both in that thread and others).

KN:

[...] if I understand you correctly, you are retracting [a statement implying you favour a ban on hospitals]?

Wajoma:

I don't have to retract [my statement implying I favour a ban on hospitals].

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
You can find it in the thread "The REAL welfare queens," on page 9 (as well as many others places, both in that thread and others).

KN:

[...] if I understand you correctly, you are retracting [a statement implying you favour a ban on hospitals]?

Wajoma:

I don't have to retract [my statement implying I favour a ban on hospitals].

What a stupid trick.

I don't need to retract the statement about a ban on hospitals because I have never made such a statement.

Enough patience has been expended dealing with this.

DFTT

Originally posted by Eladar
In the UK if you are too old you can go to hell.

yeah, well, in the US, the delineating line isn't age, it's money.

So, in the US, if you're poor, you can go to hell. At any age.

Originally posted by Suzianne
yeah, well, in the US, the delineating line isn't age, it's money.

So, in the US, if you're poor, you can go to hell. At any age.

That isn't exactly true. If you are poor enough the government picks up the bill.

In the US you can go to hell if you make too much to be considered poor but not rich enough to get insurance.

As they force more and more of us who could afford insurance into government funded medicine, government funded medicine will provide less and less.

from the BBC

"Age discrimination may be preventing older people from having access to vital surgery, a report suggests.

The Royal College of Surgeons and Age UK looked at surgery rates for six common procedures for English over-65s.

It found a wide variation in access to treatment depending on where people lived and a "worrying" difference between the over 65s and over 75s.

NHS England said it was committed to "ensuring older patients had equal access to treatment".

'Important questions'

The report said there could be valid reasons for this - the patient opting not to have treatment for example - but said the NHS needed to investigate the findings.


The NHS is far from perfect but it is transparent enough to let 3rd parties see its data.

How available would this info be in US?

My 87 year-old father-in-law has been offered ops on his shoulder and knees but
declined on the advice of his GP. I suspect that the UK figures are skewed by this
sort of advice. The health system in NZ is not quite as good as the NHS but it is a
similar model.

Originally posted by wolfgang59
My 87 year-old father-in-law has been offered ops on his shoulder and knees but
declined on the advice of his GP. I suspect that the UK figures are skewed by this
sort of advice. The health system in NZ is not quite as good as the NHS but it is a
similar model.

I'm not impressed with using doctors to convince the elderly not to get help. The medical profession should not be used to 'convince' people to not have procedures.

From what I'm reading Euthanasia is on the rise in Europe for the due to doctors convincing people it is time to go.

Even if the cited article were true, it would simply indicate that a government agency administered by conservatives has been systematically underfunded for the past five years. It's surprising to me that so many right-wing libertarians seem to conflate agency and government where it is convenient to suit their arguments while simultaneously ignoring the appallingly centralized outmoded hierarchies in the private sector, which vaunt the supposed omniscience of CEOs, but which apparently aren't a fetter to individual liberty. Evidently formal freedoms are more important to right-wing libertarians than real, felt freedoms, like the appalling soviet desire to earn a living wage, or the evil Maoist sin of being able to qualify for reasonable healthcare.

On a tangential point, it would be genuinely interesting to see a demographic chart of just how many libertarians are working-class, because I suspect many of them take felt freedoms for granted precisely because they don't understand the daily struggle of workers just to survive, let alone raise three cheers for a stateless utopia that still mysteriously always seems to have the cognitive dissonance to raise an army and a police force, and presumably whatever other middle class comfort blankets spring uppermost to the libertarian mind.

On a personal note, I remember working in a hospital in 1995-6 in a hospital in the North-East of England which was appalling run-down after eighteen years of Conservative spending cuts, in the dying embers of the Major administration. That same hospital was almost palatial after Blair's first term, which in keeping with its evil Bolshevik programme actually ran a budget surplus where Major had run a massive deficit. As ever, the state of the NHS has as much to do with the political commitment of the government as it does with the original vision of Aneurin Bevan, and also with the fact that social care is not and never has been anything other than a badly-regulated chaos of exploitative private sector companies.