John Rumm coughed up some electrons that declared:
I think a good question at this point is:
How do Switzerland do it?
I don't have any idea, but they seem to know how to run public services over there.
Cheers
Tim
Rod coughed up some electrons that declared:
I'm actually going to disagree with TNP here, a little bit. My daughter was booted straight off to Pembury Hospital (both very local and also the main paediatric hospital for the T.Wells area) when she had a rather odd problem involving blotches and not being able to stand.
Turned out to be something called HSP which fixes itself in a few weeks, with lots of rest. But the blotches raised all the usual alarm bells of horrible diseases.
The point being, that with kids involved, nothing seems too much trouble. On call GP ruled out the obvious nasties the night before, then refererred her to our usual GP in the morning. He declined to diagnose and phoned the hospital for an immediate admission. In all I reckon she was seen by about
5 doctors right up to the senior consultant. Bloodwork and other tests verified the diagnosis, and we were sent home at 8pm with instructions on what to look for (in a few % of cases, complications with kidneys can happen) and an order for a weekly check and tests by the GP with a final hospital review in 6 weeks.Whilst they couldn't cure it on the spot, I felt very assured that all the other nasties had been discounted and that there's a regime in place to deal with the rare, but undesireable, complications.
OTOH, my dodgey knee finally got diagnosed by the GP as a mis-tracking kneecap, which is fixable entirely by physio, but I have to wait 15 weeks for that. Seems to be getting better by itself thanks to a bit of walking and lots of cod liver oil.
My daughter's treatment shows what is possible if things are working.
But alas, my physio and TNP's experiences aren't uncommon, even round here. Pembury was also one of the hospitals affected earlier this year by crap hygene and MRSA.
The NHS really is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, but wouldn't it be good if the fraction that seems to work could become the majority case...
Cheers
Tim
No, it isn't. Doubts were being cast over the whole banking system and iceland in particular more than 18 months before the meltdown.
I Know, because I had to invest a lot of my mothers money to pay or her care around 2005, and I was extremely worried, read up a lot, avoided AIG, and actually picked HSBC as being least exposed to the UK and USA financial idiocy.
YOU on the other hand felt that since it wasn't your money, you could leave it to S&P's or Moodiys, who are paid BY the financial institutions to rate their products for them
You can trust a financial 'expert' about as much as you can trust a labour governmenmt when its in their interest to be economical with the truth.
But never mind. Brown is ans infallible as the Pope. He will see you right..ha bloody ha!
18 months for FT. IIRC Tracy Alloway was the first, bit I was preaching doom and gloom more than 2 years ago..thats more because I get a bit of raw city gossip from an ex financial journalist tho. Terrible gossip, desnt understand what hes saying, just parrots it..three years ago he was blowing off about 'CDS, SFP's and GM bonds, and no one knows what teh f*ck they are really worth, no one cares, Moody's just toss a biscuit in the air, and if it lands chocolate side up, its gets triple A'
Now he isn't the most reliable person in the world, but it was enough to start looking..Especially when Martin Wolf had been voicing quite intellectual dismayu at eth rise in consumer debt, and the balance of payments.
For several years before.
But its different when its your faimilies money. You take extreme care of it. Who gives a f*ck when its public money from the taxpayers.? as long as it got rated correctly your job is safe isn't it?
Probably the best argument for private versus public wealth to date.
well dont get me started.
Just how 'fair' it is for someone in a large house producing less rubbish, using less transport and services and having no kids at school, and getting f*ck all police presence to pay 5 times as much as a family of 4 that litter the streets and run three cars and produce 4 times as much sewage, is beyond me completely.
Now I can see how you missed all that vital stuff in the FT. ;-)
Pretty good here also. I went to local hospital with a shadow in the vision in my left eye. One look, and within a few days I was at the regional eye centre. Thorough examination ("not seen one of those before but I'm pretty sure I know what it is") and only a few more days and I was having it looked at, at Barts in London. That was a Friday; offered admission on Tuesday following, operations on Thursday and Saturday and home on Sunday.
Oh, it's a malignant melanoma. Treatment was having a radioactive disk sewn to the back of the eyeball for two days. Follow up laser treatment. Vision in that eye is fading, but at least it's under control (I hope).
Indeed, that only makes it the second worst medical care system on the planet though.
Indeed.
When my mother broke her hip, and was diagnosed with progressive dementia, I had to watch a process of fear confusion and at times blind terror, take over someone who, if it had been my favorite pet dog, I would have put down instantly.
Looking back on the 4 years in two care homes, at best we managed a couple of days of reasonably pleasant time together. Mostly she didn't know who I was, where she was, or what the hell was gong on. Finally she was a drugged up vegetable in severe pain and basically trying to starve herself to death, which she succeeded in doing, finally.
I've seen my favorite cat do the same. I was stupid enough to take it to the vet, and spend a fortune on keeping it alive another few weeks, when it was in such pain that I couldn't bear it and took it to the vet and said 'put the damed thing down, I cant bear it, send me the bill' and rushed out in tears.
Not allowed to do that with mothers, sadly.
Although the doctors quietly do 'play god' and step up the morphine doses..to the point where its moot as to whether its natural causes or a morphine overdose..
Look my beef is not totally with te NHS as such. It used to be, well yes, underfunded, underequippped, with Gorgon like matrons stalking the wards, and pretty basic, BUT it WAS sterile, it WAS clean, and mostly they fixed you if they could, and there wasn't 15 adminstrators and 5 non english speaking nurses per every foreign doctor, and although the doctirs had to work bloody hard, they didn't faff around with makework when they had seriously ill patients to care for.
Its not physically possible to give everyone the absolutely best medical care, any more than its possible to give everyone a stately home and an army of servants to run it., There isn't enough money in the whole economy, let alone the staff, to do that.
Sop should we deny the best acre to *everyone*? shoudld we stop people trying the expensive alternatives, if they can afford them? even if you might find out something that way.. I say the ansy promulafted by L:abour, is tat everyine can have that staley home wit an army of servants: That was in fat preisely waht I was told by a Suth African when te ANC would come to power 'we will all have houses with a mercedes and two swimming pools'
Now those that have, even one, irrespective of race, have it surrounded by razor wire and with an alarm every 2 meters..you have to go to Africa to see the logical flaws in socialism. There isn't enough money in the countries to keep everyone from starving, let alone actually having what we might call a decent standard of living. If you simply reduce everyone to that level, nothing ever changes. It's a brutal fact that only by allowing a select few to actually start to grow better than their fellows, that ultimately development for the benefit of all happens. The 'socialist' argument is that if you can't afford to educate everyone, its unfair to educate *anyone*..madness. That's Mugabe's way, and look what its done.
The time to learn how to slice the cake, is when you have a big enough cake to slice. Before that, you had better feed the bakers, or there wont be a cake to slice.
the doctors are usually excellent, the nurses wiling and hard working, and the diagnoses usually pretty thorough. Thats the good side. they are also full of useful kit.
Its the billions of man hours wasted in form filling, surly receptionists and 'management' whose whole job seems to be to enforce rules against common sense, and make sure that they keep their jobs, whilst preventing anyone else from doing theirs.
In just about every area I have come across direct government control of money, I have found that more money was spent making sure money wasn't wasted, than the wasting of the money would have cost.
Its like employing an office stationery cupboard janitor at £12k a year to make sure that you only lose £70 of stationery a year rather than £7000.
And then finding out they are nicking the stuff themselves and selling it on..
Yep. If you aein trouble they do teh right thing. I went in because I MIGHT have hada detached retina.
In fact is just some bloody jelly drying up. The only worthwhile thing after being poked in te eye for an hour by an obviously very junior (Romanian?) doctir was when the more experienced opthalmologist came over at her request to 'check my findings' and did exactly the same tests in 6 minutes and dismissed me with 'if you see a really black patch coming don like a blind, that's retinal detachment, otherwise its just various floaters and dry jelly patches pulling away from the retina tat we cant treat anyway.
I wouldn't have bothered to go except a few years ago, I noticed that the venetian blinds in one eye (IYSWIM) had got bent..and went to the same eye clinic, where after an hour of tests they announced 'yes, you have a damaged retina, exactly where you said you had, and no, there is nothing we can do about it'.
Complete waste of time.
nope. None of the above. Sitting in about half a million capital losses after I paid taxes at the height of the dotcom boom, and reinvested in stuff that went down badly..so I try to make capital gains only. ;-)
On paper my annual income is about £2500.
This year I'll add another £140k loss to that lot. Thanks gordon.
Thats before you look at the loss in value on the house..
I may actually have to start another bloody business.
Still at least labour will be cheap and the highly 'leveraged' competition wont be able to compete with my paltry wages.
I reckon my net worth is about 50% of what it was a year ago. I sill have to pay this tax, that tax, the other tax, and until they ave ripped all your capital way, they wont give anything back.
So building a school, and charging fees to recover the cost 'helps nobody'
Taking a piece of land, turning it into a farm that produces food 'helps nobody'
Building a factory that spits out say shoes, at half the price 'helps nobody'.
blimey, no wonder the country is in a mess.
well laberspik and laber think has it that the factory is *only there to pay the people that money* so why not dispense with the factory and simply give the money to the people directly as welfare?
not being able to count beyond ten without removing their socks, the concept that an industry is something more than the government is, i.e. something that employees people because they don't like to feel idle and useless, but is really there solely to distribute spending power to the great unwashed, is a concept simply too far in advance of their capability to understand.
Which is why the highest pay goes to the treasure who lose ten million in dodgy icelandic banks, whilst the dustman who collects the rubbish probably gets about £18k a year. After all, doing something USEFUL is not to be applauded, but penalised. Its the useless Cnuts in government who are Important People.
THAT is correct in every way.
every job I have had is about 1% of the stuff I learned being employed for 99% of the time.
and 90% of what I learned never being used at all,. Until a new job, and a new problem,and you dredge back to it all and sometimes dust off the textbooks.
I couldn't even remember how to solve a quadratic the other day..
Very much so. There are islands of excellence, in a sea of mediocrity, and quite a number of downright lethal patches of incompetence/negligence.
It may not raise a huge lot in the overall scheme of things, but if it wasn't there, then various actions would become less or more attractive (which might be good or bad). If IHT is abolished, I own the Mona Lisa and am your decrepit father, the pressure is for me to hold on to it rather than selling and crystallising a CGT gain, leave it to you, whereupon you can sell it free of tax (since you are assumed to have acquired it at market value at time of death). Which is OK save that you could really do with the money now.
IOW abolishing IHT would encourage older people to accumulate capital, when there is a strong argument for passing it down to the generations that need it.
I am not yet au-fait with the details, but my understanding of the Australian system is that there is no IHT, but CGT is levied on all assets at the time of death as if you had sold them the day for market value before you died. So there would be no tax on the family house or cash in the bank, but there would be on investment properties or the Mona Lisa.
I first went because I thought I had had a bleed from the blood vessels at the back of my eye.
This is quite often followed by a detached retina. Keep an eye out for a disk encroaching on your point of view. As soon as you see the disk, get to your local hospital for diagnosis and referral.
Mine took 2 weeks for me to get worried.
I find that hard to understand these days. They went through the white of my eye and removed some of the fluid, repaired the detachment and injected a bubble to assist the repair. Coming back to the ward, I had to lay face down for 4 hours and then spend the next 2 weeks laid on my side. Nearly 2 weeks of this was at home. Being an active person, it drove me crazy. The bubble was put there to push the retina back onto the inner side of the eyeball.
Driving was OK but looking at the dash was a bit of a problem, as the bubble got in the way.
How long ago was that? On my second post op visit, they told me that they were going to laser my other eye, as it could come out in sympathy. (I never knew I had Labour eyes until that point)
Dave
The last DPM could count to 11 by removing his pants, or could that be one? ;-)
Dave
It could be argued that hospitals are to treat those who're already ill, whereas statins attempt to prevent illness in the first place.
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