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If you were aware of the the Medicines Act 1968, any advice about healthcare is, well, ill-advised.
That said, read the parable of the car mechanics
Imagine you were concerned about the amount you were paying out on car mechanic bills. The general public share that concern and bribe/lobby their MPs to enact the National Car Maintainence Act which makes car treatment free at the point of consumption but obviously taxation is increased to pay for this.
Within a short time scale this becomes a national treasure second only to the NHS. Everyone loves it. No more worries about those "odious" bills you occasionally had to pay for to those "scum private" backstreet mechanics (that Michael Moore did his oscar winning documentary about).
No need to take responsibility for the upkeep,maintenance and running of you vehicle. If your oil runs dry, no problem. You put unleaded in your diesel, no problem. The costs for those are a thing of the past. After all, it has been judged (democratically) to be unfair.
However there are some who advocate private insurance to pay for this as opposed to ever increasing taxation . Debates begin about which system is better. Either/or.
One day you hear a schmuck (who is an advocate of personal responsibility and the legal concept of strict liability) say in "ridiculous smarmy prose" :"Life without car mechanic bills. Now there's a thought"
Would you ask how that could work ?
A glass that is 5% full is reason for optimism in my world.
But people do things for reasons, which are affected by motivations. Almost everything we do is touched, directly or indirectly, by varying forms of abstraction (i.e. right/wrong, love/hate).
So it makes no sense to state that looking purely at the surface act will give us any decent understanding of the world.
There is a very good (empirically grounded) reason for this, and it is called 'theory of mind'. In most everything we do (not just involving humans, but animals and even inanimate objects, especially in children) we infer motivations, thoughts and feelings onto other people to work out how they might react or feel about something.
Theory of mind is the phenomena that allows things like trickery and deception to arise; but also compassion and reciprocal altruism (not just in humans but animals also).
Abstractions (for example: metaphor) form a large part of how this system functions. There is a neurological basis for this, because it has been demonstrated as a deficit in people with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
So suddenly, abstractions become pretty important.
But in light of the above (my) point, this is not a tenable description for all forms of reciprocal altruism, but only for forms of legal contract. Altruistic actions do not need people even to have met or seen who they are acting toward, in order to feel an 'obligation' that motivates an action.
In direct relevance to this debate here, lots of people talk about not wanting to live in a country where there is a danger that people will suffer for want of medical care. In many cases this will be reciprocal altruism. Such people feel an obligation, which motivates action, and is often grounded in abstract ideas about the world (i.e: what is good or bad).
Leaving something (a room) in the state you found it, picking up litter (in areas where a penalty is not a significant motivation) - these are other mundane examples of reciprocal altruism, but ones that structure and affect everyday life. They are grounded and motivated in abstracted forms of knowing (i.e: ways in which we see the world).
And this is the crux of the issue - the chain of argument in this reply clearly demonstrates that you are framing the entirely of the discussion (of social reality, in fact) in legal terms.
Your critique of my invocation reciprocal altruism rests primarily on it not conforming to agreements made in a contractual (legal) format. You then criticise me for not adopting a form of argument compatible with the form of argumentation/process in which you feel comfortable.
But as has been demonstrated, there is evidence for this (reciprocal altruism); and your preferred way of knowing excludes many things which are demonstrably important for people and for societies.
Your statement here is more telling, in general terms, about the way you see the world than anything you've said directly. You frame things in legalistic terms, which is all well and good up to a point, except you don't recognise the limits of this (i.e: what it can tell us about the world).
No doubt I lack many of the proficiencies of legal scholarship necessary for courtroom success. But we are not in a courtroom; now or for most of the time in the lives of the majority of people.
Laws are a system of a priori rules (conditions for proving something, established before the fact) enforced by institutions. They are not omnipotent, and do not capture or legislate the world - they are an emergent (human derived) part of it - grounded in some form of a priori abstraction.
But thank you, because now I at least know the position from which you are arguing.
No, what I would find is not that they 'are' but that 'he said that they are'.
OK.
But to address your analogy, my car maintenance is all paid for, but I still check the oil because the inconvenience of having it in the garage after it seizes is pretty significant.
Let's not - because it's shifting the issue from survival and direct suffering of the body and human beings to the maintenance of an inanimate appliance.
Back on topic
I think that we're going to need to get creative about employment if we want to minimise the social cost of mass unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, from cuts in public services.
Successive governments ran to the university sector to take up the slack in the last great wave of youth unemployment; we haven't the luxury of that over spill now.
I hope not, given that life expectancy is lower in the US
Anyway, we're going to have to cut public spending as soon as possible. Just about every respected financial institution out there seems to think this, and I see no reason to disagree with them. I object to protecting certain areas (such as education and health) from cuts, on the grounds it would mean to absolutely massive cuts in other areas as a result. It would create the sort of apartheid system in the public sector which socialists are forever claiming to disapprove of.
I think this "re-adjustment" should be used as an opportunity to re-shape this country, one which has been going in the wrong direction for many years now. Let's start by cutting down the size of the NHS. Let's have an NHS which doesn't attempt to do absolutely everything. This will also mean the drugs bill will fall, the staffing bill will fall, etc etc. Let's also get rid of all the smoking cessation officers and other parasites in non-jobs who don't do anything worthy of taxpayers money.
Let's get involved in far fewer wars. That'll save yet more billions for the country. Instead of trying to fight an unwinnable war on drugs, (the opium fields of Afghanistan come to mind) legalise the damn lot, but with strict controls on their usage and taxed. We don't want people driving under the influence of the likes of cocaine, do we?
Education? Let's release the system from state control. Let universities become fully independent, charging whatever they want to students, setting up their own bursary and grant systems. Let schools do something similar, only with government funding the majority of the cost in this case. Keep the school leaving age at 16, reversing the Prime Mentalist's mad plan to raise it to 18.
Plenty of savings to be made, and I've not even started on the welfare state that the psychologically flawed Scot has created...
Do you think the nhs picks up the bill for people's irresponsible behaviour, which is then passed on to everyone through taxes then? And that people should take more personal care over their health, which they would were the nhs not there?
And let's put them on the dole instead. Now, with all the people that *could* have quit smoking, let's wait and sit on a ticking time bomb with that one. In 20 years time when they're all dying from cancer and having to fork out billions to treat them, rather than the millions it's costing now we can look back on 2010 and think "well at least we saved some money back then".
Preventative medicine might be expensive, but chucking some free nicotine patches at people is a hell of a lot cheaper than keeping them alive in a hospital whilst we try and treat their cancer.
I see no reason why I should have to pay in order to improve the health of a person who has done nothing to help their own.
So the same obviously goes for people who are injured in accidents that they could have avoided, or those who have got food poisoning because they didn't cook their chicken enough?
The beauty of the NHS is that you don't have a choice. You either pay, and contribute for everyone, or you bugger off and live in America or Russia where you're pretty much left to die unless you've got a credit card handy.
Interesting.
"Done nothing"
So anyone who eats fatty foods, drinks at all, goes out in sunlight, eats meat at all, has a car accident, has a sporting accident (for example) shouldn't get treated on the NHS?
Can you explain that comment, I don't understand what you mean by "apartheid system" or why you think that Health or Education should see the same level of cuts as International Development for example?
So, apart from smoking cessation, what else shouldn't the NHS do - which will lead to staff and drugs bill reductions...
So, similar to the US system? Which produces such amazing results...
I forgot to point out, you're also in favour of denying help to those who are willing to help themselves.....can't believe I missed that contradiction.