At one time the Health Bill seemed based on some coherent principles, but no longer. Martin McKee (professor of European Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK writing in the BMJ) can’t understand it, and is accustomed to teaching on such things. I can’t keep track of what the current situation is. One of my few rules of thumb, I’d hesitate to say principles, general or otherwise, but an idea I apply and await disproof of is that when people are making things more complicated, and I can’t keep track, it is because they are criminals if it is business, or generally dishonest or malevolent in some other way. And not people to trust or do business with if it is possible to avoid doing.
Understanding the Bill: Impossible
January 25th, 2012The Health Bill having failed is a distraction from pensions
January 24th, 2012Doctors – and nurses and midwives – being capable of holding more than one thought in our heads at a time are quite independently deprecating on the one hand the implementation, and the underlying coherence (there isn’t any left) of the Health Bill and on the other hand the raid on our pensions.
Our pensions were re-engineered 3 years ago, carefully, and taking time, and the scheme remains in surplus for the future.
Pensions are complicated, and not best fixed by liars or the innumerate.
And we have great sympathy for those whose private sector pensions were stolen by plutocrats, media moguls, fraudsters and the like, or turned out to have been based on wrong arithmetic and prospects, but we suggest fixing yours, not wrecking ours to match.
An egalitarianism where each of us does what he wishes, for about he same hours, and draws the same income and facilities from society while working and while not working has its attractions. But it doesn’t seem likely. As it is, we stash away a lot of our not inconsiderable income for a pension, and we don’t want it turned into a tax, thank you.
And if you think we’d be an exception, you are an optimist.
Breasts and money at the Open University
January 24th, 2012Cosmetic surgery tourism and anthropological thoughts on the institution of credit antedating that of money.
Meanwhile in London (Bevan’s Run)
January 15th, 2012Clive Peedell et al arrive in Whitehall protesting the mess being made of the NHS. I’d be there if I wasn’t a long way away.
Here we go again?
January 14th, 2012Gruaniad article by Cardiology Registrar on the badness of the Health and Social Security Bill.
I’m old enough to remember the previous time we had a Department of Stealth and Total Obscurity. It was split because, I think, it was too big and unwieldy. Are we better at handling such masses? Is the total amount of trouble to handle in it no larger? I think not. So is it going to work this time? Optimism would be nice, but realism seems safer.
10 years on: constraints added
January 10th, 2012Since I wrote this brief piece on what happens after the NHS collapses: http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/28/apres-deluge-moi a raft of constraints have been introduced – or are asserted to be about to be introduced.
It wasn’t something I said that set that off was it?
Neo-liberalism: sounds plausible but didn’t work.
January 8th, 2012the BBC’s Newsnight economics editor, Paul Mason:
“A deregulated banking system brought the entire economy of the world to the brink of collapse. It was the product of giant hubris and the untrammelled power of the financial elite. Basically neoliberalism is over: as an ideology, as an economic model. Get over it and move on. The task of working out what comes after it is urgent . Those who want to impose social justice and sustainability on globalised capitalism have a once-in-a-century chance”. Mason P. Meltdown. The End of the Age of Greed. Verso. 2009
Via Bevan’s Run
Removing a patient from a gp list is a last resort
January 7th, 2012http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/05/removing-patients-from-gp-lists-is-a-last-resort/. Indeed so. Rare. We are trying to make our lists bigger, for various reasons, and losing a patient doesn’t do that.
Pinternet needs to handle Creative Commons well
January 7th, 2012pinterest.com is a nice idea and shiny, but must assist and persuade its users to give credit for CC material such as my picture of a box of macarons.
Mine! CC use with attrbution.
There is, or should be a synergy between what they seem to be doing, and what the Creative Commons movement is trying to make easy. BUt copyright still exists, and in a reputation economy acknowledgement is mandatory.