Shock Revelation: Free Markets Are Not Heaven On Earth
Remember one of Mrs Thatcher’s catchphrases: “You cannot buck the markets”?
Yes, but you can certainly get bucked by them. Quite.
When Mrs Thatcher ended up in Downing Street, some observant commenter noted ‘You are the first woman prime minister’ to which she replied something like: “And the first prime minister with a science degree”.
We were all stunned. Suddenly, we had the cleverest person on earth running the country and for the next thirty years (a whole generation) we all lived under Thatcher’s Law or spiv rule.
Any system, from picking your own nose to the entire world, could be turned into a market, where some moneygrubber would be able to filch from others to get rich and those with less sharp elbows would be trampled underfoot by the mighty onslaught of the free market in all its terrible grandeur.
Because this was sold to everyone by such a clever person, who sufficiently terrorised all around her that their brains melted and they were unable to raise even the weakest line of defence, we have all had to suffer the nonsense of this delusion.
Thatcher sold the idiotic and childish dream that everyone could get richer and the poor lapped it up because, quite naturally, they wanted some of the wonderful things that the rich had always had. The fact that the poor would be taxed to make the rich even richer beyond the dreams of avarice was never declared. Everyone suddenly forgot their infant school sums, which said that if Tommy eats 99 per cent of the pie, Timmy is going to go very hungry indeed.
Ordinary people also forgot Michael Moore’s First Law of Economics, which is this: “You are never going to be a millionaire”. He also said: “These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control”.
Still, it’s only a game with money, after all. It is hardly life and death.
Oh, woops! Apparently it is.
It now seems that the free market which was imposed upon the NHS by Thatcher and gleefully endorsed and developed by the man with the big brain, Gordon Brown, may actually kill you after all.
The theory was that patients would be converted into chattels with a price tag to be traded by competing hospitals. The hospitals which accumulated the highest aggregate value of price tags would be rewarded financially: paid for by the taxpayer, of course.
Whether this would actually lead to an erosion of patient care and the chances of being cured by a hospital rather than having it kill you was never part of the equation.
This is the result, according to AOL News:
Competition between NHS hospitals may lower the quality of patient care, researchers have warned.
When hospitals are forced to compete with each other death rates from heart attacks actually rose, they found.
The decline in standards means patients are worse off even though waiting lists and waiting times have fallen, according to a paper published in the Economic Journal.
Professor Carol Propper at the University of Bristol examined the “internal market” in the NHS created by the Conservative government in 1991. Labour has introduced similar market-based reforms intended to improve health service performance.
She found deaths from heart attacks actually went up in hospitals covered by the reforms. Heart attack death rates are used as an indicator of overall hospital performance.
So, you already knew that successive governments are picking the money from your pocket to give to their rich friends; you knew that this government is selling you down the river to their corporate masters; now you know that they are glibly killing you for profit.
Thatcher’s Britain, New Labour’s New Britain: all the same thing.
The Bug In The Compensation Culture System
The “compensation culture” is often portrayed as the system whereby feckless, work-shy, grasping misfits exploit legal loopholes and institutions’ fears of legal action in order to extract payouts for imaginary or, indeed, entirely concocted wrongs.
It is a type of ‘money-for-nothing’ parasitism, which bleeds the state dry of the tax payments it receives from normal, hardworking British families.
There is, of course, another type of compensation culture, typified not by the staggering lout sloshing his tin of Special Brew, who then trips over his shoe laces and sues the local council for not keeping the pavements in proper repair; but by the suited executive who is promoted beyond their level of competence and then wants a handout when things go predictably (by anyone but them and their bosses) and spectacularly wrong.
When this happens within a company, you can say it is just a normal, sleazy commercial transaction. The two parties employ their respective lawyers and in the end one of them wins and the other one has to cough up. Effectively, it is nobody’s business but theirs.
Of course, it can also happen in circumstances where the taxpayer is again the one who has to cough up, as if both the funds and the patience of the ordinary working poor were both infinite, to be squandered by those who already, perhaps, have had too much of a good thing at other people’s expense.
Here is a little nugget, picked up from the increasingly dodgy annals of the National Health Service (NHS) which obviously carries a public health warning, as it is riddled with the usual encrusted clusters of disease which Gordon Brown and his mop-happy taskforce are even now trying to eliminate before the target for the “NHS Hospitals Do Not Have To Kill You” initiative are reached.
From The Telegraph:
The health chief blamed for a hospital superbug outbreak which killed 90 patients has rejected a pay-off of £75,000 and wants twice as much.
Rose Gibb left her job “by mutual consent” as chief executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust in Kent last October after a Healthcare Commission report criticised her handling of the C.difficile infection which hit 1,176 people in three hospitals between 2004 and 2006.
Over a two year period, about 1200 people were affected by the virulent bugs which are now seen as a necessary part of the NHS culture and just one of the risks you have to run if you want to be treated in a hospital. In Maidstone, the Kent and Sussex and Pembury hospitals, about 180 people either died or had their deaths brought forward by the rampant bugs which lurked and festered in filthy wards and other areas.
Here is a little test. Under these circumstances, what should happen to the manager who takes responsibility for this? Should they:-
A. Be given the sack and threatened with legal action?
B. Be given a massive payout?
So, the question is now how much money the manager should be given from taxpayers’ funds in lavish compensation for not being able to do their job.
Apparently £75 000 was considered the least acceptable amount by the NHS, but the culprit wants twice that.
Tony Charlton, the son-in-law of 86-year-old Florrie Field who died of C.diff in May 2006, said: “It shows the utter cynicism on her part - more than that, it is callous.
“Rosa Gibb should not have been allowed to go the way she did, being allowed to leave four days before the report came out.
“If she had stayed she would have been sacked for gross misconduct and then she would have got nothing.”
Yes, you could say that.
But surely, if you are struggling on a normal wage of about one sixth of the offered compensation and doing your job properly, but with no chance of ever seeing the dizzying rewards for incompetence that NHS managers take as their right, you must see that £150 000 is simply fair.
Surely you do. It might take you ten years to earn that, slaving away day in day out and doing your job well, but of course it is fair that someone gets that sort of money when they are useless.
No? Maybe you are just not suited to today’s compensation culture for the very rich.
NHS Kill Or Cure Lottery
Just as the NHS might have thought that it had put a feather in its own cap by jumping on the data loss bandwagon and losing thousands of patient records, it now seems that its old core function of saving people’s lives might be coming under threat.
No, not the usual MRSA and other superbugs which you can avoid happily for a lifetime until you have to enter the environs of a National Health Service hospital, at which time you are stricken by these infections and killed before you can even hobble to the nurses’ station for assistance.
Not even the fact that the legions of so-called managers, who bleed the system dry of funds so that they can spend their days idly shuffling stacks of paper and making pie-charts and histograms on their laptops, whose sole job seems to be to ensure that no patients ever get treated, in case in so doing they drain the sloppings of the gravy train, which they have become addicted to filching.
This one is simply due to the fact that as Britain slithers to become a third world economy, with thirld world education standards and a banana republic administration, the NHS naturally cannot be expected to be on a par with other European countries, but must inexorably follow suit.
The BBC has this:
More than 17,000 deaths a year in the UK are unnecessary and due to poor NHS performance, campaigners say.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance compared World Health Organization data for five leading European countries.
It found the NHS had 17,157 extra deaths in 2004 compared with the other countries’ average when taking into account age and burden of disease.
The government said investment in recent years had cut waiting lists, improved choice and saved lives. [...]
Report author Matthew Sinclair said: “Thousands are dying every year thanks to Britain’s health service not delivering the standards people expect and receive in other European countries.”
The report recommended NHS bodies be given more independence from central government.
As far as the last sentence goes, there will be no chance of that under Gormless Gordon and the power maniacs of his administration.
In The Telegraph:
Britain compares poorly with other European countries on deaths that good health care can reasonably be expected to prevent. These include conditions such as certain cancers, diabetes, flu, some cases of heart disease and some infectious diseases.
The mortality rate in Britain was at an almost uniform rate between 1981 and 2004, implying the extra billions pumped in by the Labour Government since 1999 has had little effect on patients, the report says.
The funding has been spent on higher wages, increased costs and more managers instead, the campaign group says.
The Guardian quotes the report as saying:
“Billions of pounds have been thrown at the NHS but the additional spending has made no discernible difference to the long-term pattern of falling mortality … we need to learn lessons from European countries with healthcare systems that don’t suffer from political management, monopolistic provision and centralisation.”
So, now you know where at least some of your tax money has been wasted by New Labour - and, of course, the other Micky Mouse governments of Major and Thatcher which preceded this present bunch of sickos and criminally insane misfits.
If you do find yourself falling ill in New Britain, avoid going to see the doctor or popping into your local hospital, erm, like the plague.
You would be better advised to seek out the local bog-hag witch and hope that in her steaming cauldron you might find something which, if it does not immediately cure your ills, at least does not actually kill you.
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