I realize that I will probably offend generations of political anoraks with this bland assertion, but I’m going to make it anyway: “social” anything, whether it’s “social democracy” or “pure socialism” or “social something else” ultimately means that the costs for bad things get pushed onto society as a whole. Whatever the motivation for said “social” thinking may be, that is inevitably the outcome of socializing. I believe very much in outcomes, irrespective of the motivation.

Probably the greatest divergence between my own thoughts and those of statist people is that motivation is irrelevant, the outcome is what is important. I don’t care if greed is the driving force behind a better life for all, and I don’t believe that any stupid idea that leads to things getting worse for the people it’s supposed to help should be permitted, just because the motivation is noble. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily always attribute evil motives to the various disasters inflicted on us by a succession of increasingly socialist governments. I don’t believe for one minute that the faceless bureaucrats, EUreaucrats and quangocrats who seem to spend their days dreaming up ways to nanny, hector, bully and annoy us actually do so out of some perverse desire to inflict misery on us, I believe that most of the time, they genuinely believe that they are making these rules because they honestly believe that they will make life better for all of us.

The same thing with those calling for greater or better regulation of anything. They do not make these calls because they want to strangle business (unless they are the incumbent, of course!) — they make these calls because someone, somewhere has done something evil or malign or at least incredibly stupid, and the call goes out to protect the unwary and the innocent.

They do not necessarily understand how they regulation to protect us all from X ever happening again will not protect us from X happening again, because what actually does protect us is the fresh, recent, painful memory of how many people got stung by X. Ponzi schemes have been around for centuries, but Bernie Madoff got away with a Ponzi scheme in the hugely regulated financial sector, not because there is no regulation preventing Ponzi schemes (there is and it’s rigorously enforced) but because it’s been a while since the last big Ponzi scheme and nobody recognized it when it came round again.

Indeed, the strictness of the regulation around Ponzi schemes actually reassured punters, who assumed that the supremely compliant Madoff had to be doing good business, because he was in such a highly-regulated area. Think about it yourself: you never really dot every “i” and cross every “t” on every single contractual agreement you make, precisely because you “know” that everything is regulated and you are therefore protected.

And all this goes without even considering the horse-trading and lobbying around regulation in reality. Incumbent businesses love regulation, they adore it. This is why you often find that businesses will create societies and guilds and associations if there isn’t already some form of government regulation. By doing this, they try to enforce their business model on new entrants to a market and force them to do away with potential advantages that the incumbents don’t have. If the new player won’t sign up to “the rules” then the incumbents can immediately accuse them of having something to hide.

So, all the normal mechanisms of “social” engineering, however well-intentioned, will only ever occasionally and temporarily actually protect us in the manner in which they are intended to.

But the one thing which socializing does very well is to amortize the costs of “mistakes” or negative externalities or bad decisions across everybody in the society. Now, you may consider this to be a very good thing. But once again, the intention is good, while the outcome quite often is not.

Let us take for example, care of the disabled, something which surely no civilized person could object to. If you knew you that the child you (or your partner) was bearing could grow up profoundly disabled, requiring constant attention and considerable cost for home modifications, medical care, etc. Now, if you were in a society which did not socialize costs, that decision would be a completely different one. Unless you were incredibly wealthy, there would be no way you could afford that child, so you would probably opt for termination. In a “socialized” society, you make that decision on a completely different basis.

Leaving aside the debate about whether this is better for society as a whole or not, let’s just assume that the socialized society is a better one. I don’t necessarily believe that allowing one small group of people to enjoy the “benefit” of time with the disabled child is fair to the rest of society who have to pick up the tab, but let’s just assume that it is. The problem comes in the absolute limit of resources available to a society. People will always want more things than are available to them. Even a state as large and powerful as the USSR in its prime could not deliver all the needs of all its people all the time. Unlike in our society where most people have a decent (or better) life and a very few struggle, most Russians lived with just the basic necessities and very little luxury.

In our society, the hallowed NHS is the very acme of socialization of cost. Every taxpayer contributes to it and every subject of the Queen is entitled to use its services, whether they pay for it or not. But even though the NHS has the annual budget of a small country and employs millions of people, it cannot deliver the healthcare that everybody in the country needs. Thus, despite the prodigious amount of money that goes into the NHS every year, services are continually being cut, and there is always a disappointment for even genuinely ill people who have paid into the NHS all their lives who suddenly discover the truth, that some arbiter somewhere has decided that their particular problem, no matter how life-threatening, does not merit the NHS paying for the treatment desired or in some cases required. Hence the ever-popular “postcode lottery” headlines in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

This in turn leads to the NHS trying desperately to shift the burden of responsibility for these unpleasant choices elsewhere, like the growing indications that smokers or drinkers or the obese will not be entitled to care because of self-inflicted or avoidable conditions. This completely ignores the massive tax contributions made to the NHS by these same people. The NHS is happy to get the tax contributions while shirking paying back to people who pay this money in. This is a most egregious example of the difficulties facing socialized costs, along with not paying for state-of-the-art cancer care or “wonderdrugs” for people who desperately need them, despite their having funded the NHS all their lives.

These are particular examples, there are many more. The upshot of all this is that while socializing costs sounds like a wonderful idea and allows us to make “more civilized” decisions, the truth is that socializing costs does not take them away and at some point, some faceless arbiter is going to take difficult decisions that mean that for every happy family that has (for example) a well-cared for disabled child, there will be an unhappy family that has (for example) seen their beloved wife and mother eaten away by cancer because there simply wasn’t the money to buy her the new wonderdrug. If family A had decided not to have their disabled child, maybe family B would not have lost their mother.

Socializing costs does not take costs away. Eventually, difficult decisions have to be taken.

And broad-brush decisions taken by impartial, uninvolved people will naturally affect many more people than decisions taken by people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

Thaddeus J. Wilson

Thoughts on Social Democracy is a post from: Anna Raccoon

I’ve got the hang of the local accent now; I rattle confidently through the questions with them as they laboriously write out the answers in triplicate. Nom, prénom flies out in the correct back to front order; I deliver my telephone number in batches of two digits at a time, no longer do they turn into ducks barking ‘quoi, quoi, quoi’ at me.

Then comes the dreaded ‘livret de famille?’

‘Non, Madame!’

Only this time we are computerised, this time it is not just the look of horrified bewilderment, the search for comforting colleagues that can deal with this unbelievable situation.

This time it’s the blue screen of death, M. Le Chef sent for, and the bureau grinds to a halt.

You might as well apply for a mortgage in the UK and tell them you are unemployed and of no fixed abode as tell a French medical computer that you do not have a ‘livret de famille’ – it simply won’t progress to the next page of questions without the number of your all important record of birth commune, various marriages, how many children you have.

The computer is tempted with the response ‘Anglaise’. No dice. It is probably surreptitiously tempted with ‘bloody stupid foreigner’ for all I know. It’s not playing.

I produce the photocopies of birth certificates, marriage certificates, utility bill etc, which I habitually have about my person – I have been through this scenario many times before, as you can tell. Even my all important ‘carte de rendezvous’ showing that I will have surgery on Thursday – this blood test is important.

The computer is unmoved. I might have Mad Cow disease! (Pipe down in the Snug, please, I’m speaking)

M. Le Chef has an idea; he once had this problem a long time ago. Could he please have my ‘Carte de Groupe Sanguin’. ‘Non, Monsieur, je n’ai pas’….. The blue screen of death apparently spreads from the computer across the face of all present. ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi? Three ducks in a row. Pole-axed, dumbfounded, agape, aghast, thunderstruck!

M Le Docteur in charge of all vampire duties is extracted from his surgery. He speaks English. He explains the documents I am carrying from the anaesthetist. Here, see? The anaesthetist wants to order 4 litres of blood in preparation, it is not just a matter of checking me for that well known English ailment of Mad Cow disease, but it is the responsibility of the laboratory to check my documents and tell him what blood group to order. There! Look! He requests the details by fax three days before he will let the surgeon loose on me – it is his responsibility…

I should have a card that tells them that exhaustive checks have been made that I am who I say I am, born in the commune that can vouch for me, to the parents that were known by the Mairie, he cannot believe that I go through life – did I travel there by car? – and do not have on my person a card telling them my fully documented blood group…oh damned consternation. These ignorant foreigners!

There is nothing else for it, I must be treated as though I had just been born in the glorious French Republic – they would create a Carte de Groupe Sanguin for me, the computer could be mollified.

This is such a serious matter that two sets of papers must be prepared. Hand written since the computer still isn’t playing ball.

I am marched into the first Doctor. He recognises me (as well he might, I am still smarting from our last encounter). He knows I must be on their computer – it seems in handwriting the documents, they have spelt my first name in the French fashion, and thus it doesn’t match up with my dossier. He rushes out and everything is painfully rewritten. Now he can ask my name once more, and I can produce my passport to verify my identity, and my date of birth, and, and, and – finally he extracts an inch of blood and sends me back to the waiting room.

Five minutes later, another Doctor calls me – and we go through the charade of checking that I am still the same person I was five minutes ago, and ten minutes ago, and even fifteen minutes ago. He extracts another inch of blood.

This personal responsibility business takes some getting used to.

You see, it is my body, my responsibility to ensure that I get the right blood, that I am free of dastardly English diseases, and the Carte de Groupe Sanguine will prove all that. So they do it twice over, with two different Doctors, (to make sure I haven’t bribed the first one?)…..I could have chosen the laboratory that I trusted with this all important task too. There are three or four in every main town.

I was amused in hospital when it was decided to send me off for a second opinion by ambulance to be asked ‘which ambulance?’ When I answered with a shrug – ‘they all look the same to me’, the Doctor returned with a handful of brochures from the different ambulance companies…..I picked the one with the square headlights of course, how else could I make a decision?

But it is my body they are conveying, perhaps I have heard rumours that one company drives too fast, or maybe my cousin works for another company? Choices, choices, unheard of with the NHS.

I had thought that my appointment with the anaesthetist, quite distinct from my appointment with the surgeon, was to allow him to check that I was fit enough for him to risk his reputation on – not at all, now I learn that it was for me to also decide whether his eyes were too close together, did I trust him? – I could have turned him down and requested another!

Now I understand why as I waited to be called by him, earlier names called involved entire families standing up and marching into his room – a big decision, grandma, mama, papa, and the maiden aunt all wanted to size him up and help decide whether they were prepared to entrust their precious relative to him!

Choices, decisions to be made, personal responsibility, scary stuff. It works though.

It’s all very foreign to someone brought up with the NHS.

Blood Sucking Bureaucracy is a post from: Anna Raccoon

And so it ends, the National Compact first dreamt up in the dying days of the Second World War called the Welfare State.

The Welfare State was always a ponzi scheme of gigantic proportions, that relied on the next round of investors paying out to the first batch of ‘investors’. The only difference between the welfare state and criminal schemes of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff is that you did not have to join their schemes.

With the Welfare State it was and still is compulsory to join, or face the wrath of the state for failing to join a scheme which was bound sooner or later to fail as all ponzi schemes do. Bernie would have loved to have enjoyed that level of compunction.

Lord Warner has ‘advised’ us all that the game is up for the baby boomers and he is calling time on ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state. Yet the political classes will still pretend that they are defending the welfare state and the NHS when they know that the edifice is collapsing around their ears. Ken Clarke is also telling us that the middle classes have no idea the depth of the ‘cuts’ that are going to have to be made. That, Ken, is because the political elite will not dare tell us that it is over for fear of not being elected again.

Rather than treat us as grown ups, and announce the contract between the State and the individual has been broken and the State is defaulting and to start cutting taxes to allow us to make the ‘voluntary’ choice of  with whom we spend our medical insurance money with, they are tinkering with a 1950′s system and proposing that instead of anonymous committees of political placemen/women deciding where they will spend our money, that GP practices are best placed to make these financial decisions.

The one set of people that they will not trust to make these decisions with our own money is us. Given the choice of placing your loved one/yourself in a clean efficient hospital or one run by monolith unions and bureaucracies where there is a distinct possibility of you dying of thirst, being starved or contracting something you did not go in with, what rational choice would you make ?

The Fabian parties of the Big State, the deficit denying Labour Party, the soft left Social Democrats and bizarrely the Cameronian Conservative party will carry on protesting the NHS ‘is safe with them’ and everything in the garden of the welfare state is rosy, when they know that greenfly, death-watch beetle and couch grass have rendered it to the level of a bomb site rather than a ‘Health Service that is the envy of the world’

The State will not accept that it will play a diminished role in our lives in future because they need direct and indirect taxes to go up to fill in the black hole in the nation’s finances. Even now the rate of growth in public spending has only slowed, it is not going down.

The Political Classes have broken the Military compact. Blair, supported by the Labour and Conservative Parties started wars then kept the military short of helicopters and basic equipment. The MOD simply lost control of their finances under Brown. Now some faceless bureaucrat is issuing redundancy notices by email to warrant officers. He/She should be facing the sack. However,  we will never even find out his or her name.

The game is over. Shoot the Sacred Cow before it falls over with Bovine TB, and let us start taking responsibility for our lives, our future and our health.

Andrew

Killing The Sacred Cow is a post from: Anna Raccoon

In Hereford there is a purpose built podiatric hospital. That’s a foot hospital for the benefit of those who cruise the Internet looking for any mention of paedophilia and get confused with paediatrics.

I had been in intermittent pain for some 20 years, and no one had ever figured out what was wrong. The podiatrician took one look at my foot and said – ‘that’s a fine Morton’s neuroma you have there, my girl, I can fix that’.

That was the good news; the bad news was that there was a three year waiting list for surgery, and I had now got to the point where I couldn’t even drive safely. I enquired whether it would be very expensive to have the operation privately.

About £700 was the answer, and yes, he could see me in three days time…….

Three days later I was comfortably ensconced on his operating table, cup of coffee in one hand, chatting cheerfully to him as he went about his business behind a screen shielding my foot, and we got to talking about waiting lists.

‘Why’, I asked, ‘didn’t the NHS make use of his facilities if their waiting list was so long’?

‘But they do’, he replied, ‘my first patient this morning was an NHS patient’.

According to the Guardian this morning, I had just been ‘lured’ into private medicine; it wasn’t as simple as that.

The NHS allowed him to treat just four patients a year for Morton’s neuroma, hence the waiting list. Same hospital, same surgeon, same treatment, same pool of patients. Had he not been treating private patients as well in his facility, the four patients a year that the NHS considered should have the operation would not have paid his overheads, and no one would have been treated. There was no NHS facility that could offer that operation.

The Guardian is pushing the argument that ‘those with cash can jump ahead of those in need’ as a result of Andrew Lansley’s decision to remove the cap limiting the proportion of income that hospitals can earn from private medicine; nowhere do they point out that in many cases ‘those in need’ would have nowhere to go however long they waited were it not for ‘those with cash’ supporting the private institutions.

There is some interesting language in that article. ‘Lure’ is just one word that jumped out at me. ‘Entice’ had the same effect. ‘Shopping abroad’. ‘Targeting’. I quite expected to see ‘grooming’ pop up at any moment. This is language we are more used to seeing in articles concerning paedophilia, the demon of the modern age. I suspect for much the same reason.

The Guardian wishes us to see Doctors who take their money directly from willing participants as demons, as opposed to those who take their money via the government and forcibly from taxpayers.

However, academics caution that the rush to the market could lead not to NHS trusts profiting, but to them being undercut by ruthless foreign competitors or losing patients abroad. “What’s to stop US healthcare companies coming over here to poach patients. Or GPs sending patients to India for cheap operations? Or English hospitals raiding Scotland for sick people?” said Alan Maynard, professor of health economics at the University of York.

Indeed. Hopefully there is nothing in our legislature that would prevent US healthcare companies or anyone else from offering relief to the sick. English Hospitals ‘raiding Scotland’ for their rightful property? Sick people who should be sitting waiting patiently for their allocated treatment are in some way the property of the Scottish parliament? Perish the thought that they should end up full of gratitude to some English hospital!

Papworth Hospital, home to the first successful heart transplant in the UK, will soon be submerged into the new 135-acre Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Some of its operations are so complex – with costs running into £25,000 for 10 hours of surgery – that the NHS can only afford to pay for 80 a year.

Why would a Labour government have wished to restrict Papworth to a 2% cap on that private income which has allowed it to develop techniques which result in 80 people being able to take advantage of their expertise at no cost to themselves?

I was so confused by this time that I telephoned the good Professor Maynard and asked him if he could explain to me why it was a ‘bad thing’ that Scottish patients were treated in English hospitals.

He tells me first of all that the Guardian had been somewhat selective in its use of his words. (Noooo, you mean that they just used the bits that supported their agenda? Surely not!)

What he had told the Guardian was that Lansley’s removal of the cap, in conjunction with his removal of targets for reducing waiting lists, could mean that some hospitals on the borders of Scotland, England and Wales might possibly be tempted to ‘poach patients’ in order to up their income, providing that NHS Scotland was prepared to pay for them, and that this could in turn affect the waiting lists for patients in the English hospitals. What he was calling for was for regulation to be ‘considered’ at the same time that would ensure that one lot of patients didn’t suffer at the expense of another lot.

I am slightly mollified. As mollified as my efforts to understand health economics in under two minutes allows me to be. Professor Lansley didn’t come over as quite the ‘essential Marxist’ I had been expecting after his reported comments. He certainly wasn’t railing against private medicine, and he does have a point in that whilst one can argue for a totally free market, that could possibly result in the cheapest healthcare proving to be in India.

Nothing wrong with that if you are talking about a length of steel, but healthcare is slightly more complex, and definitely more emotive; if your child has to go into hospital for a lengthy stay, it might change your belief in pure market forces to discover that the only hospitals left are the cheapest – and in Delhi. However good they are, however cheap, would you not prefer to have maintained a more local solution?

So, would someone like to explain to me the Libertarian answer to this dilemma?

Health Economics. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

[Ed. Anna I need 150 words on transplant patients by 8am]

30% of Transplant patients die before they ever get the chance of a donor organ. According to NHS figures, three people die each day waiting for a transplant.

However the family of a 28 year old committed Christian told of their horror at learning that she had been given the heart of a Muslim suicide bomber. Her father said “she would have been horrified to have known that heart was from a Muslim suicide bomber and quite definitely would have refused that operation. She was always anti-Muslim because of her strong right wing faith.”

She underwent surgery last February and there were complications from the start and she spent more than six weeks in intensive care. She died after having endured an extra five months of life with the heart of a suicide bomber beating inside her. The cause of death was pneumonia and not related to the donor’s faith or desire to live in the arms of 40 virgins.

[Ed. Stop right there Anna, Legal say you are infringing Race Hate legislation. Start again]

30% of Transplant patients die before they ever get the chance of a donor organ. According to NHS figures, three people die each day waiting for a transplant.

However the family of a 28 year old father of 10 by nine different women told of their horror at learning that he had been given the heart of a transvestite drag queen. His father said “he would have been horrified to have known that heart was from a mincing queen and quite definitely would have refused that operation.  He was always homophobic because of the way I brought him up.”

He underwent surgery last February and there were complications from the start and he spent more than six weeks in intensive care. He died after having endured an extra five months of life with the heart of a homosexual beating inside him. The cause of death was pneumonia and not related to the donor’s sexual proclivities.

[Ed. Stop right there Anna, Legal say you are infringing………. Start again]

30% of Transplant patients die before they ever get the chance of a donor organ. According to NHS figures, three people die each day waiting for a transplant.

However the family of a 28 year old committed anti-smoker told of their horror at learning that she had been given the lungs of a man who had smoked for 30 years. Her father said “she would have been horrified to have known that lung was from a smoker and quite definitely would have refused that operation. She was always anti-smoking because of her condition.”

She underwent surgery last February and there were complications from the start and she spent more than six weeks in intensive care. She died after having endured an extra five months of life with the lungs of a smoker breathing for her. The cause of death was pneumonia and not related to the donor’s smoking.

[Ed. Great Stuff Anna, we’ll stick that on the front page, legal say its fine, you can say what you want about smokers.]

Have I got room to say that the family only learnt this after applying to see her medical notes – a well known manoeuvre prior to taking legal action?

The Smoker in the Deck. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

This won't hurt a bit. No, really!

America has the highest quality treatment of any country in the world, and leads the world in medical innovation

But (and this is a very big but!):

the cost is simply too high

We know that their healthcare is good, even the Canadians concede it. And the Canadians are widely held up as an example of a society that has got it right, especially compared to the Americans. But healthcare in the States is horrendously expensive. I know that people who have long-standing health conditions can’t even get divorced because moving off their spouse’s health insurance will make it impossible for them to get their own – the insurers won’t touch you if have an existing condition, or they won’t cover any existing condition. That is surely a cruel and perverse incentive.

So, why is American healthcare so expensive?

The answer to that is actually straightforward, but those on the economic left simply don’t want to admit it. It is, in fact, the same problem we have with healthcare in our country: People don’t pay for their own care.

Yes, you read that right; the problem at the heart of the increasing costs of healthcare is the same on both sides of the Atlantic, despite us having superficially very different systems. In Britain, it is obvious to people using the NHS that the government picks up the tab. In America the cost is borne either by the government, by the patient’s insurance company, or by their employer. In both systems, it is ultimately the patient who pays; through taxes, insurance premiums or lost job opportunities because of the costs imposed on employers. However, the cost is never made apparent to people in the same way it is when shopping for other goods.

If you’re not aware of what something costs you, why would you behave any differently than an MP with a trough-sized expense account? The market mechanism needs price information to work. If the prices are argued out between people who are not actually using the service and the transaction occurs away from the people using the service, then the people using the service don’t really have any incentive to shop around to make the best balance of price versus “performance”. This not only leads to healthcare becoming more expensive and not becoming cheaper, but it also leads to less innovation in the actual health care.

Your health is not a “right” or something that must be maintained at any cost. If your health was that important, no-one would be overweight, no-one would eat sweets or chocolate or drink anything but water, no-one would smoke, everyone would eat only raw vegetables and exercise regularly, etc. Since nobody actually lives like that, everyone is making the implicit decision to balance their health with their enjoyment of life. And if you’ve made that decision, then the cost/benefit analysis of the level of healthcare you want is just another aspect of that balance.

By all means, have health insurance to help you manage the costs and the unforeseen. But let people get the market information to help them make more informed decisions.

Healthcare revisited is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Life used to be very simple. You found a husband, got married, got pregnant. A few people skipped the middle bit, but not so many as tipped the social balance.

When the time came, you tied a tea towel round the bed head, hung on for grim death and gave birth.

If you’d been fortunate enough to find a husband who had fed you well and looked after you, and God had smiled on you, you gave birth to a fine bouncing child who grew up to look after you when you got old.

If you hadn’t, then either God or the local midwife (your next door but one neighbour, not something that had done four years studying social science and ticking boxes) took care of the situation in mysterious ways that often seemed to involve a fluffy pillow in households that were simply not equipped to cope with a severely disabled child. Either way, you thanked God for his wisdom.

We (society) decided that this was pre-historic, barbaric, discriminatory and a lot of other things besides. So when we invented the NHS, we also invented Social Services, and Benefits. Now you didn’t need to find a husband first, and thanks to birth control, having a baby became a ‘lifestyle choice’, not the result of your own actions. You also became a ‘customer’ of the new fangled NHS, and their production line maternity suites.

Naturally as a ‘customer’ who had ‘chosen’ to have a baby, you had every expectation of a perfect product complete with warranty.When you didn’t get that, you sued, of course.

If you can find a way to blame the NHS for your child not being perfect (Note: you do have to be able to pin the blame on a NHS employee – ” she went off to have her lunch break ” “he was listening to his Ipod at the same time” that sort of thing) then the lawyers estimate on average, that the NHS will have to pay you around £6 million pounds these days.  A staggering sum, but that is the lawyer’s estimate of the cost of caring for your less than perfect child in an absolutely perfect way – specially adapted house, all the help you might need etc.

Of course, we musn’t forget the Benefit system, for whether or not you were lucky enough to pin the blame on an NHS employee the benefit system still kicks in and provides DLA for the entire life of your child. It used to work out at around £340 a week for the full package. Receiving £6 million in damages doesn’t stop the benefits, you don’t have to give them back because you don’t need them any more.

If your child does not survive until adulthood, that £6 million will be handed over to you.  The customer. You don’t have to give it back because you don’t need it any longer. In fact if your child does survive until 18 but is not considered mentally competent to make a will leaving all ‘his’ £6 million to you, then a special court will make that Will for him, so determined is the system that you should get your money.

Even without the need for entire life care, you can expect to receive between £250,000 to £450,000 if the NHS manages to damage the bodywork of your child whilst you are being serviced. One law firm is currently handling more than 90 cases of just one type of injury that can be caused by an over zealous midwife. A duff arm – I have one myself, I have managed to get through my entire life with it without suing anybody!

Its never too late to sign up for this amazing scheme:

A man who suffered brain damage at birth 37 years ago today settled his medical negligence claim for a compensation package which could be worth more than £5 million.

Last year the NHS paid out more than £35 million in legal fees to keep this lottery on the road – Irwin Mitchell’s in Sheffield alone accounted for £11 million of that. One in four NHS trusts paid out more in legal costs than in compensation. In some cases the legal costs have been 10 times greater than the damages paid out.

When you add the legal fees to the actual damages paid, you are into stratospheric figures.  Just in Wales, the NHS is facing potential claims of up to £500 million, in England it is around £700 million.

If you can’t pin the blame on anyone, then you have to fall back on the old system of blaming it on God and getting on with your life with just the Benefits system to help out with essentials costs.

Your average medium sized hospital costs around £200 million a year to run, so we are talking about the running costs of SIX hospitals here.

Just for being able to pin the blame on someone – becasue nothing is ever going to change the disability.

The way we were. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The news this week that the state was handing over £3million a year to Weight Watchers, and Slimmers World, to persuade the ‘deserving poor’ to shed some of their lard, incensed me.

It came hard on the heels of a government report lambasting ministers for spending vast sums of money on “ineffective and possibly damaging” interventions which they hope will force lifestyle changes on the public, without carrying out the most basic research to see if the programmes make any difference.

The Health Select Committee said: “More public money must not be wasted on ineffective and possibly damaging interventions”.

Yet within days we hear that valuable NHS resources are going to a private company, apparently on the advice of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, who recommends that GPs send people to free slimming classes, because it was cheaper than weight loss pills or stomach stapling!

The NHS is in the business of saving lives. There is a justification for preventative medicine. The dental checks that were once commonplace were an excellent example. Weightwatchers is not a check-up however, nor is it a ‘cure’  – it is an incentive to taking the cure, as are weight loss pills and stomach stapling.

The  ‘cure’ comes free – eat less, exercise more.

I was about to write the words – ‘this is a bribe, nothing more nothing less’ – when a little more research turned up this gem……

In January NHS managers in Kent faced criticism after it emerged they were offering people ‘bribes’ of up to £425 if they managed to lose weight.

The Pounds for Pounds scheme run by Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust offered patients cash prizes as part of a diet competition, which paid out £70 to participants who lost 15lbs, a further £90 for 30lbs and £265 for those who shed 50lb.

Those who are still managing to work in these straightened times should not have to pay out extra taxes to bribe these selfish blobs. During the same week we also heard of a family of four with a combined weight of 83 stone saying they are “too fat to work” and need more than the £22,000 they currently receive in benefits.

Fat cat bankers and Fat blob chavs – we cannot afford to support you both.

One of you is going to have to go ‘cold turkey’ and less of the turkey ‘twizzlers’.

Get off the Taxpayer’s back – you’re too damned heavy.

Fat is not a political issue. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

All law is imposed morality. Law is never neutral; it rewards certain behaviours and agreement with those values doesn’t make them any less of an imposed morality. Despite the fact that it stakes a high moral purpose, particularly after the excessive law making of Tony Blair’s government, and Gordon Brown’s claims to set a moral compass for society, it actually contributes to the wrecking of society and to its taking measures which can only be described as fascist in character.

Society is now divided into victims and villains; even the villains are seen as being a product of their environment, and are thus recategorised as victims themselves. Personal responsibility is dead, buried under an army of outreach workers.

Adwelly writes:

“a significant proportion of our population have been brought up and educated over the last 60 years within a welfare state”

That statement is true in so far as it refers to the 1945 welfare settlement, but I believe it omits a vital point. It is only in the last 40 years that the welfare state has excluded personal responsibility.

Those of us who are old enough to appreciate the morals and mores of the pre-1967 years have a very different perspective on life from those born and raised post 1967.

The spectre of the unmarried Mother who has a baby in order to acquire a council flat is trotted out time and again as an illustration of all that is wrong with the welfare state. It is not, it is an illustration of all that is wrong with a welfare state denuded of personal responsibility by a legislature determined to impose its own top down morality.

Let me take you back to the early 60′s, those of you who are not old enough to remember. There was a welfare state. It provided medical care for the sick, food for the hungry. It didn’t, however, assume that you had no responsibility for yourself.

Young girls had an array of birth control devices. There was the shame of being an unmarried mother; marriage was still seen as the ‘natural’ environment for a child to grow up in, thus ‘maternity benefits’ were only available on your husband’s National Insurance number — no husband, no benefits. There was the time honoured method of ‘keeping your legs crossed’, primitive but effective. Rape was an issue then as now, countered by asking and expecting a brother or respectable friend to ‘walk you home’.

The arguments in favour of the Abortion Act were a product of the feminist movement, women were seen as victims, no longer responsible for their choices. In hindsight, it was an early example of the cult of victim-hood for all. The mini skirt arrived, and women demanded the right to walk home alone and apparently, by the mores of contemporaneous society, half dressed. The Abortion Act would remove the consequences of their actions. Not all women could or would have an abortion. The government decided to abolish the consequences of that choice – in future these ‘victims’ would be given a council flat, and benefits to remove any disparity between them and women who had made different choices.

The National Health Service saw a similar interference. Where once it had been portrayed as free access to a revered professional, it became an ogre that you could easily fall victim to – and thus should be able to sue. The birth of a child with Down’s syndrome, or cerebral palsy, was no longer an accepted factor of life that you rearranged your household to accommodate, but an avoidable tragedy that you had been the ‘victim’ of and should be  compensated for. Compensation ostensibly for the child, but the welfare state already did, and continues to, despite the compensation, provide for that child in the form of Disability Living Allowance, amongst the myriad names it has been known as over the past 60 years.

Unemployment benefit was not seen as a ‘right’ to which all who happened not to be employed were ‘entitled’ to, whether they be a 16 year old who had chosen not to remain in the family home, or a fit and healthy 40 year old who had never so far held a job of any description; it was given to those who had held down employment, who were responsible for a family – mostly males in those days – and who found themselves out of employment through no fault of their own.  All others were means tested, examined, probed and poked, by the Social Security Board, who grudgingly handed out the bare necessities of keeping body and soul together – no allowances towards the cost of a TV or video, no clothing allowance, merely food and the lowest possible rate of rent. Now the wilfully unemployed are seen as victims who must not suffer, if they choose to live  in a £100 a week – or more – apartment, the rent will be paid, they are not responsible for their plight, nor often, expected to do any more to help themselves other than call into the local DHSS office every six months or so.

Adwelly said:

“When I discuss Libertarianism with people, welfare is the point of the discussion where people start getting out the crosses and garlic”.

Again I would say – it is not the welfare state that is the problem, it is the welfare state combined with legislation designed to remove personal responsibility that is the problem. Reinstate personal responsibility and the welfare budget will shrink to a manageable size that could and should be borne by a compassionate society.

I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to say that I am advocating a return to the work house and that taking personal responsibility is demeaning and discriminatory?

Marching towards an imposed morality…….. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

On Monday 9 March 2009, the Channel 4 Dispatches programme broadcast How They Squander Our Billions, a documentary on government projects including the NHS’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The NPfIT had an initial announced cost of £2.3bn which rose to £6.2bn and later £12.7bn. A key objective of the NPfIT is the introduction of something known within the NHS as the Spine which is part of the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS). Check out the NHS Connecting for Health Spine Factsheet which includes the following information:

What is the Spine?
The Spine is part of the NHS Care Records Service, which is creating an electronic care record for all England’s 50 million plus patients.
Each patient’s electronic NHS Care Record comprises full local records, held on computer where treatment is provided (such as the GP surgery or hospital) and a summary record of important details both demographic (eg: name, address) and medical (eg, allergies, medication, test results) held on the Spine.
The Spine is a national, central database where summary patient records are stored. When fully implemented, local records will automatically upload important information to the summary patient record on the Spine.
Why have a Spine?
Once the NHS Care Records Service is fully implemented, having each patient’s summary record stored on the Spine will mean that wherever and whenever a patient seeks care from the NHS in England, those treating them will have secure access to summary information to assist with diagnosis and care. The summary record will also point clinicians to where full local records are held. This should provide safer, more joined up care.
What will the Spine do?
The Spine will:
• store personal characteristics of patients, such as demographic information
• store summarised clinical information which may be important for the patient’s future treatment and care, such as allergies, visits to A&E and adverse reactions to drugs
• ensure the security of systems required to restrict access to the national and local systems
• provide a secondary uses service, using anonymised data for business reports and statistics for research and planning purposes
• interface with all the local IT systems within the National Programme.
And so on.

Less than a year ago I attended a training course on this very system designed to ‘interface with all the local IT systems within the National Programme’ in order to provide ‘safer, more joined up care’. Well, it all sounds lovely and efficient, except that I have worked enough years and in enough different departments of the NHS to know that trying to get the countless and different in-house IT systems already in use within the country’s hospitals, clinics and surgeries to ‘interface’ in the way described above remains a very long way off.

Which is why I was entirely unsurprised last Autumn that my mother’s cancer care was interrupted for 6 weeks while her paper records were transferred from one NHS Trust to a second NHS Trust, via a central records depot in a third NHS Trust, before her details could be entered onto the second NHS Trust’s local IT systems and management of her disease could be recommenced at her new address.

If there’s a better example of how easily the NPfIT is providing this safer and more joined up care after 6 years and so many billions of pounds, I’d like to see it.

Skeletons in the cupboard. is a post from: Anna Raccoon