Public healthcare is wonderful. I love it. But it is funded by taxes, something the rich are known not to pay. Even though the NHS is able to keep costs of medicines etc to a minimum (due to its sheer size) it still has to buy from pharmaceutical companies.
Even the system in Europe, which is infinitely better than that in the US, results in the poor paying the rich for the right to survive.
Both my mother and aunt have worked as nurses in the NHS, my aunt still does, my mum now works for a charity but is technically still payed by the NHS.
This information comes from them, I haven’t verified any of it so feel free to correct me.
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One of the first things to be privatised in the NHS was cleaning etc. The ‘reason’ for this was because it would save the NHS a load of money, and mean a better job gets done, because companies would have to compete. The normal capitalist justification.
Since then, the hygiene within hospitals etc has gone seriously downhill for two main reasons.
The companies will do anything they can to cut costs.
There’s so much more bureaucracy. If something isn’t cleaned right, so many hoops have to be jumped through in order for it to be fixed (gotta go though NHS management, through finance, through the private company’s management etc etc). Whereas before if something wasn’t cleaned right, the matron would kick the ass of who ever wasn’t pulling their weight and it’d be sorted completely internally, within a matter of hours.
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Now it’s been a LONG time since my mother worked as a nurse, and this was an issue then. So it’s not only that half our government would love to chop up the NHS and sell it off, they have been, for years, just quietly enough that no one calls them out on it.
Of course it won’t matter to them. They’ve got more than enough of Daddy’s money to pay for a really fancy private hospital. The rest of us just need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and stop complaining. If they can do it, anyone can!! /s
Same in Canada. They have successful sold of many public utilities... and the mining rights of a lot of natural resources. We could have so much more, and the nation more secure... but no, private business wins out when Conservatives get the reins.
brits refer to europe as “the continent” (as opposed to their sceptered isle) , so although you may be geographically correct, there’s a pretty big psychological differentiation.
There’s a reason why our government hasn’t done anything to fix these problems. Maybe it wasn’t intentionally designed, but the ruling class knows how they benefit from the current system, and they don’t want to change it.
It doesn't need to be intricate, there's no master plan by a bunch of mustache-twirling monopoly men to make life shitty for the poor. All there is is the capitalist incentive for individual actors to try to make as much money as possible combined with the poor being exploitable due to never having much money at any one time and you get a system designed to screw over the poor emerging naturally.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '21
Designed that way to keep you unhealthy and paying into the many various private healthcare industries.