The future of the NHS

Sympathetic to this case but the UK mil spending is, in total, less than we pay a year in debt INTEREST, about £30bn a year vs £40-70bn on debt INTEREST. My point, this would be a drop in the ocean. Even Tridant is only 30bn over the life of the program. or about 2 months NHS spending.

I'd like any ideas that take into account social services too. And as I said in OP, be drastic. Wait. No I didn't mention that. K guys, any and all radical solutions welcome (aside FULL COMMUNISM NOW!)

The only question worth asking is whether the UK has the physical capability to provide adequate healthcare to its citizens. It obviously does, therefore any problems are the fault of the economic system and not intrinsic to the idea of public healthcare itself. Did you see the government asking "where do we get the money from" when they were bailing out the banks?

Eliminate the bureaucracy and market mechanisms within the NHS which were deliberately implemented to make it look bad

Increase funding to 10% of GDP

There's a party here that involves many health workers that campaigns to improve the NHS. It's mostly progressive on the whole socially and politically too.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Action_Party#Policies

its fucked. I bet half the reason they want to leave the EU is so they can kick out all the staff, 40% are immigrant, so they can use this as a way to further kick it to pieces so they can privatise it by saying the state doesn't work

I disagree. Money is a factor too./ Look at the number of newly trained docs choosing to practice abroad, usually in a nation with a larger private healthcare sector than the UK.

It's so transparently malicious, I can't believe how many people are just okay with the government deliberately sabotaging the healthcare system they rely on.
It's as if half of liberals think they'll never get sick.

yeah no. the oddest thing is that neets from Holla Forums want it gone.

We will take no concessions from the Bourgeois State, down with the NHS.

If you're gonna be a Tankie do it right

youtube.com/watch?v=TE1NFDIT9WM

Bro, the NHS was founded by Clement Attlee's based socialist government. Another term and Britain would have had a centrally planned economy.

This won't work.

from the hundreds of billions they're owed in taxes by companies, and the millions they spend on the monarchy (in excess of what they could've spent themselves), the millions in dysfunctional weapons systems and an obsolete military. We could get money from enforcing min. wage laws, and therefore tax income, we can invest in our economy to grow it.

We spend, per capita, half as much as your average EU country. A third as much as the US. It's not a matter of "where it comes from", it's a matter of "when will they invest in us rather than corporate and imperialist interests".

tell us then o wise leftcom

I don't think cutting military spending would be wise at this time, when the USA are thinking of pulling out of Europe.
The Russian threat is overhyped but it is still real.
And if the Russians don't come for us, letting the EU build it's own army might come back to haunt us in the future now we're leaving.

Look up how much NHS spends on PFI hospitals.

It doesn't matter how much money you throw down the black hole of the public-private partnership, until you remove the real welfare leech - the private sector. Exterminate the Conservative Party and the Blairites too.

Money from foreign (financial) assets are factored in to MMT.

Financial inputs into the economy are:

G - Government Spending (government sector)
I - Investment (private sector)
X - Exports (foreign sector)

Financial outputs from the economy are:

T - Taxes (government sector)
S - Saving (private sector)
M - Imports (foreign sector)

Remember in accounting that money has to have come from somewhere: every surplus has a corresponding deficit, every asset a corresponding liability. This means that in an economy over a given period of time, by definition, adding up all the surpluses and deficits of each sector will sum to zero:

G + I + X = T + S + M

(G - T) + (I - S) + (X - M) = 0

So we get this equation if we split the economy into government sector, private sector and foreign sector: (G - T) = (S - I) - (X - M)

Therefore, any net savings (S - I) are equal to the government deficit (G - T) + net exports (X - M). That means that if you want to run a trade deficit with the rest of the world, but don't want people to borrow more than they earn, you have to run a government deficit. It's literally impossible not to increase the public "debt" if you want to keep the economy functioning long term whilst running a trade deficit. People can't go on taking on private debt forever to fuel the economy. That's what lead to the 2008 crash.

You should really read more into MMT. It's pretty simple once you understand it, and pretty much every criticism I've read of it has completely misunderstood the basic principles it's based on.

It's not like 100% of the NHS' budget goes into the pockets of businessmen, otherwise we wouldn't have any healthcare at all. Increasing its budget will improve care, even if a lot will be wasted.

The NHS is spending more than £3,700 every minute to pay for privately financed hospitals

How about we start with actually funding it enough to meet demand for healthcare.

You already have. :^)

Who decides what private hospital will get the funds?

We abolish it because its social democratic = not leftist

Ayy lmao. Are you new to this?

We don't need to "borrow" the money. In fact, we literally can't "borrow" money; the government is the sole issuer of the pound. How is it supposed to borrow a currency that it issues?

Everyone in this thread should look into Modern Monetary Theory.

THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT HAVE TO TAX TO SPEND. IN FACT, IT MUST SPEND FIRST TO TAX ANYTHING AT ALL.

We don't have to cut military, or housing or education spending to increase healthcare funding. We don't even have to raise taxes. If more people understood this then life would be much easier for us.

This is what makes PFI such an obvious scam - it's literally just using the government's ability to print money to make a few friends of the tories rich, whilst pretending it's because the government "can't afford it". Tories really are cynical pricks.

...

I am not from the UK, but if I understood correctly the NHS spends money on private hospitals

Who decides which hospitals get that money and which ones dont?

Neither am I. NHS spending money on private hospitals is recent, and it's probably specified in contracts inked by Secretary of State and Health.

By delegating the sovereign right of seignorage to private banks, because markets.

Why, porky, the MPs you bought, of course.

You clearly don't understand inflation. Nor have you stated why you think that is a bad thing. For example, if you added a zero to everyone's bank account tomorrow, the effect would actually be a massive redistribution of wealth, as prices would inflate but nominal debt would stay the same. Inflation also leads to an increase in exports. It also encourages people to save less. These are all good things for the economy.

And that's all on the assumption that the government printing money necessarily causes inflation which is false. Inflation is caused by prices going up, not by an increase in the money supply. Prices only go up if demand outpaces supply. In other words, in an economy that is under full production capacity, "printing" money and spending it on goods and services that have the capacity increase their supply will not produce inflation. You're constrained by the real resources in the economy, not how much money you think you can print.

Well banks are essentially public institutions in the sense that they are licensed by the government to issue currency in the form of loans, but they're not really issuers of currency in the same way that the government are. The government can't go bankrupt. It doesn't have to play by the rules of the game. The banks, as users of currency, still have to remain solvent.

Although, as we see, the banks have such control over the government, they are pretty much guaranteed a bailout when their ponzi schemes collapse and they do eventually go insolvent.

...

bemp

I'd tend to disagree. If you are a large exporting nation then the net will not equal zero but a positive value. The negative appears on the ledger of the importer nation. This is a much more accurate representation of of the real world. Look at the forigen asset holdings of say Saudi or China. This is down to them being net exporters year on year. So yes, you're right that forngen transactions are included but the basic premise, that all spending is government spending (in the context of individual, sovereign nations) seems inaccurate.

Spurious. Take the care sector for example, They already have trouble getting staff and increased wages have forced care homes to shut cause the people that use the service increasingly cannot afford to pay for it in full. So again it would fall to the government.

OK. Now lets consider international currency markets. Loads of rich foreigners invest in London property cause it is a safe investment. If the government doubled over night the amount of pounds in circulation as you suggest then each £ is worth half of what it was previously. While I don't object to 'foreign absentee property holders out REEEEE', this will have adverse effects.

If you don't want to get into "theory" then you don't want a proper answer.

State ownership and public ownership are not necessarily the same thing. How such systems would work require getting into some theory. If you aren't interested in reading, or discussing, theory, then "full communism nao" is about as decent answer as you would ever understand anyway.

Not that recent. Blair started the PFI thingy. PFI (private funding initiative) allows the government to build hospitals on the never never. Essentially a private party puts up the initial funds then the NHS has a kinda hire purchase agreement with them.

see

I don't want vague leftist terms but an actual descriptor of how the role and responsibility of the staff would change, and how this would be for the better. The main reason I said no communism tho is that communist solutions tend to presuppose a socialist/communist society is already in place which it evidently isn't.

I agree with you on inflation. If everyone was suddenly more monied, not everything would get more expensive. But luxury goods would as they tend to be in shorter supply. But as I said above, foreign markets would respond to the sudden issue of loads of new £ or indeed any currency that is held as reserve by other nations.

Yeah, imagine people concerning themselves with real life, relevant issues. I forget this board is largely role playing tweens.

This is false.

WEW

Ok. It was exaggeration and simplification. But if there was suddenly a large amount more £ in circulation, the £ would likely not be seen as such a solid investment by foreign investors. I'm not wording this very well but essentialluy the issue with MMT is taht if a gov can simply print as much as it wants oir needs at any given time, the trust involved in debt breaks down. Creditors make loans knowing that they will likely be paid back a certain amount (give or take a few % for natural fluctuations in currencies on the currency market). With what you're proposing, that is that the gov could just write a trillion dollar cheque whenever it feels like it, would shake this creditor confidence. Sure, they'll get the X amount of £ back but if there are three times as many £ in circulation when the debt is cleared, the investor hasn't really made anything.

Actually it was John Major who first started "experimenting" with private financing within the NHS. Blair carried it on and the Coalition/Tory government have only managed to accelerate its involvement.

This is only true if the £ devalues, which is not a safe assumption if the spending is directed to places that fuel growth, like healthcare. A healthier population is a more productive one.

On the contrary, it makes government bonds a very safe investment, because you know they will always be repaid. Bond yields are low at the moment because people are sure that they're an incredibly safe place to put their money.

This is only true if the amount of goods and services in the economy hasn't increased to accommodate for the increase in money supply. Which it will if the money is spent wisely on things like infrastructure, healthcarem education etc.

MMT does not propose a spending bonanza necessarily, just an understanding that accounting facts are accounting facts on the macro level too, and that this means that government deficit spending is not a bad thing in and of itself.

It always nets to zero. Even for an exporting nation. What does china do with all the dollars it gets from exports? It buys imports or invests in government bonds. China have roughly $1.115 trillion in US treasury bonds right now. Eventually it will use that money for something.

This is basic double entry book keeping, so i don't mean to be overly dogmatic, but it's not up for debate. The sectors always sum to zero of the fiscal year.

On an international level maybe but even then trillions is hidden away in tax havens and the likes.

It seems to me that MMT would only work in a nation with a sovereign currency that was self-sufficient. As long as a nation needs to import it must be able to buy and sell foreign currency, therefore must have a currency that can be readily exchanged for other currencies. I don't see how this would work when one nation arbitrarily prints money