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Post by alancalverd on Jul 14, 2018 0:18:46 GMT 1
The reason we are broke as a country is because we trade on favourable terms with people who sell us more than we buy from them. One reason we are not completely broke as individuals is that, like most civilised countries, we have a tax-funded health service with (pre-Thatcher)a much lower administrative overhead than any private provider. The most common reason for bankruptcy in the USA is ill health or accident.
The only time the State would compel you to use a medical service would be if you were serving a prison sentence, certified dangerously insane, in Her Majesty's uniform, or carrying a notifiable and communicable disease. You are at liberty to suffer and die from anything else if you wish, or to pay for treatment in the facility of your choice.
Clearly you are not average. Children get a lot of NHS attention, at least half of the population visit a dentist annually and usually return for some kind of treatment, and those of my cohort and older seem to get bits welded on or sawn off at increasingly frequent intervals until they die. And why not? That's what you have paid taxes for all your working life.
The frequency of use may be somewhat distorted by the clumsiness of the system. If you take a sick animal to a vet you expect him to have basic x-ray, laboratory and surgical facilities on site and to be able to dispense most common pharmaceuticals, so you should walk out with a healthy or at least repaired dog on a single visit. But most GPs have no facility to fully diagnose, treat or dispense, so you may have to go to a phlebotomy clinic, a radiology facility, back to the GP, off to surgery, and then to a pharmacy - at least six "uses of the NHS" for a single problem.
One in three of us will eventually present with a lifethreatening cancer. Expected pathway is via GP to at least 2 outpatient clinics then sugery, 6 radiotherapy sessions, 6 chemotherapy sessions, and GP and outpatient followups ad lib thereafter for 5 years or until you die: maybe 50 interventions plus whatever other ills and pills you may be prescribed - each post-discharge dose of painkillers or steroids is another "NHS visit" if only to a pharmacy for a repeat prescription. IIRC my wife had about 100 NHS visits in the 18 months between presentation and death from bowel cancer, which, averaged over her lifetime, was just under 2 visits per year, for one problem alone, for someone who until then was in perfect health. If we add on some pregnancy and maternity services associated with four children, and a bit of dentistry, we are getting pretty close to 6 "visits" per year for a non-smoking athlete who was "never ill" and had the decency to die before she became a real burden on the taxpayer or drew a pension. Was this somehow morally or economically wrong?
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Post by aquacultured on Jul 14, 2018 0:38:25 GMT 1
Are you really sure you want to keep trotting out such hackneyed mendacious drivel, which is an insult to the intelligence Nothing mendacious about it: it's the unvarnished truth. The fact that you don't realise it, because you listen to your "gut feelings" rather than anything your brain might be able to say if you ever put in the slightest effort to think a bit about it, doesn't make it any the less so. You're completely unable to offer a single reason why we should stay in the EU, or why anyone but middle-class public servants and corporate executives who extract their wealth from the labour of struggling working people should even want to. It's you who's not putting in thinking time, otherwise you wouldn't fall back on stupid hackneyed stereotypes. And I've given reasons (maybe under a slightly different name, here; and elsewhere too) why we should stay in the EU, and have always said I've no interest in refighting the Brexit debate of 2 years ago, which would bring more divisiveness. The voters. Remember them? To that great democratic institution, the EU parliament, for one thing. [/quote] Exactly. And how did he use the salary and expenses? Then members - ordinary people - of the political party formed to get us out of this fascist organisation who elected him as their very effective leader, for another. If youi think he or Trump are some sort of exceptional temporary hiccup in your rule by exploitative mandarin, take a look at Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Greece, and everywhere else in Europe where the electorate are coming out on the streets to protest. I'd say you need to calm down.
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Post by Progenitor A on Jul 14, 2018 9:45:07 GMT 1
The reason we are broke as a country is because we trade on favourable terms with people who sell us more than we buy from them. Shome mishtake ere shurely?
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Post by alancalverd on Jul 14, 2018 10:55:47 GMT 1
Indeed. The mishtake was getting involved in the EU in the first place, then compounding it by destroying primary and secondary industries and making the sale of secondhand houses account for about 30% of the UK economy as if it were a matter of national pride.
I recall a farmer on early morning radio saying that he wasn't going to grow anything for a year. "Setaside payments under the Common Agricultural Policy will pay the school fees and feed the family, so why should I take the risk of buying seed and hiring labour in the hope of a decent harvest?"
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 15:07:04 GMT 1
I think you're forgetting that a lot of sexually active people, pregnant women, babies and the under-5s are bound to visit their GP or hospital quite a lot Don't be silly. Six times a year? Bollocks. More bollocks. Many older people are given a lot of treatment. Now, that's true. They need more treatment for all the ailments their doctors have given them. We've been turned into a nation of hypochondriacs and drug addicts. If you set up a health system where the more illnesses your doctors prescribe for the more money they earn, this shouldn't be astonishing, I suppose. My amazement really derives from this hard proof that so many people are such suckers for it.
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 15:45:21 GMT 1
The reason we are broke as a country is because we trade on favourable terms with people who sell us more than we buy from them. One reason we are not completely broke as individuals is that, like most civilised countries, we have a tax-funded health service with (pre-Thatcher)a much lower administrative overhead than any private provider. The most common reason for bankruptcy in the USA is ill health or accident. Not for much longer. Thanks to the enormous scam of Obamacare, the most common reason for bankruptcy will soon be the enforced cost of health insurance. Nope. Have an accident where an ambulance or police car is called out, you have to go to A&E to cover their asses. Not true. If there's a whiff of liability, your "liberty" soon goes out the window. My health is average, I assure you. Six times a year? I don't think so. They certainly didn't when I was a child. And pay for it. Which is a very good reason they're not there six times a year. In any case, people still privileged to have an NHS dentist don;t have any choice in the matter. They turn up when they're called or they get dropped from their list. And of course they're given treatment when they do - again, it's how dentists earn their living. It's now a proven fact that when I was a child the majority of dental treatment was entirely unnecessary - I very much doubt the assurances that this practice has really changed much. Six times a year? Two hips, two knees...two, ermmmm....Every year? No, I haven't. Like most people, I paid taxes all my working life because if I didn't I'd be thrown into jail. No, that's not how the figures are compiled, I checked that one. These are actual visits to the GP. Hospital visits are on top of that. The inability of GPs to do much more than send you off with a prescription or an appointment if you actually might be ill is deliberate. They're not allowed to do blood tests, X-rays, and the like. In most "civilised countries" they can, of course, but here the health system is run as though we were the Soviet Union. One in two, they say. And you know why? For the same reason the nation's drugged up to its eyeballs on SSRIs, statins, gaviscon, wolferin, cowpol, and all the other drugs they can shift to a gullible hypochondriacal public. Cancer's the biggest earner there is - it's Eldorado for the whole health industry. That's why you still can't get anti-neoplaston treatment for cancer, even though it's been around for nearly 50 years, and has been proven to cure still "incurable" cancers for decades. Money, money, money - an endless tap of it. Money, money, money... GP visits. All this extra stuff is the cream on top. Was she given anto-neoplaston treatment? A proven cure for bowel cancer? No, she wasn't. These 5 visits to the GP is an average. Morally or economically wrong? No - in France, Germany, or Denmark she would have had her cancer treatment free of charge too. But not her dentistry, pregnancies, etc. Why should my taxes have to pay for your wife, when, as you frequently say, you're stinking rich? In France you'd have to pay 30 % of those costs yourself - maybe more, depending. No one complains about the health serive there. It's never a political issue - it hardly ever gets raised at elections, and you hardly ever see it discussed on the news. It's a far better system than ours, by every international measurement, and one of the main reasons for that is that it's not run by bureaucrats in Paris.
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 16:10:39 GMT 1
It's you who's not putting in thinking time, otherwise you wouldn't fall back on stupid hackneyed stereotypes. They're stereotypes for the simple reason that they're valid, as we've all seen throughout this whole Brexit farago. I don't believe you. That you believe "the future is frightening" for your grandchildren is not a reason. It's a fantasy or a prejudice at best. As I said - it's quite obvious, you can't think of a single reason. "Exactly" what? What? How did you use yours? Yes, you would. See above "hackneyed stereotype". You're not young and unemployed, are you? Your government hasn't been summarily dismissed because it won't obey the directives of Frankfurt bankers. Your bank account hasn't been illegally raided to pay debts you haven't incurred to those German bankers. Your government hasn't been forced to sell off its public services and then have your bills hiked 500% on the orders of those bankers. Your town hasn't been inundated by millions of young moslem men, selling drugs on your high street, chasing off any cop that dares to show his face. Your women aren't advised by your government to stay in at night because they can no longer feel safe from molestation. In short, you're complacently calm because it's not your problem. Yet.
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Post by alancalverd on Jul 14, 2018 16:18:12 GMT 1
In fact they are, but few have the time or facilities, and those that have, need to supplement their NHS work with private patients in order to pay for them. It's generally more economical to set up a GP clinic inside a hospital than the other way around, but I've installed a few x-ray systems in large or very remote GP units and small prisons.
Anyway the question remains that if your average UK punter visits the GP 6 times a year, why?
And since there are about 6 GPs per 10,000 population in the UK. 10,000 population x 6 visits = 10,000 consultations per doctor per year, at an average of say 15 minutes = 2,500 hours in the clinic. My local GPs spend about half that time in the building. Something wrong with the statistics.
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Post by jean on Jul 14, 2018 17:08:51 GMT 1
Was she given anto-neoplaston treatment? A proven cure for bowel cancer? Proven? You have proof? Can we see it please?
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 17:24:16 GMT 1
Was she given anto-neoplaston treatment? A proven cure for bowel cancer? Proven? You have proof? Can we see it please? Ah, welcome back Jean. The recent Japanese study - 2016 I think it was, if memory serves me right - is the latest. A small sample, but big enough to produce scientific proof. More than twice the cure rate of radiation/chemo - two thirds completely cured. That doesn't mean the other third wasn't, incidentally - just that they may have relapsed in the five year period used to qualify as "cured". And with no side effects whatsoever. Otherwise, there's the two decades of court cases where the American health establishment have tried to suppress these drugs, and their discoverer, Burzynsky himself - and the NCI, who tried quite blatantly to steal the patents for them. All charges - nearly 100 of them - completely dismissed. That's legal proof. You want me to dig that paper up for you, before you try your usual ad hominem tactic of calling me a liar?
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Post by jean on Jul 14, 2018 17:31:15 GMT 1
Yes, that would be nice.
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 17:44:17 GMT 1
Ask politely then, and I might be inclined to be cooperative, as I always am. Half an hour or so finding it, I estimate, if it's not googleable, which given the power of the American medical establishment, and the tactics they use to ensure this information is suppressed, and Burzynski villified as some sort of snakeoil salesman, it may well not be. Do you know how to ask politely, when you require assistance from someone?
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Post by jean on Jul 14, 2018 17:46:57 GMT 1
I think I have just asked, very politely.
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 17:51:08 GMT 1
I think I have just asked, very politely. You asked if you could see the proof. Yes, of course you can, if you go to the trouble of finding it. If you want me to do that for you, you're going to have to ask, politely.
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Post by mrsonde on Jul 14, 2018 17:56:04 GMT 1
I don't think so. Not in this Trust, anyway. Hypochondria. The loneliness of old ladies. The gullibility of old people, generally. People of my mother's generation - every waiting room is overflowing with them, always - have been brought up to think the doctor is semi-divine. 260 plus million GP visits a year. NHS statistics. If doctors are fiddling their claims, that wouldn't surprise me.
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