[NetBehaviour] Dr Hairy in: Big.Data, part 2

[Joel Weishaus]

Edward;

It's why I've stopped reading newspapers, as the greed, the madness 
began my day on the wrong foot.
I know that it wouldn't go away if I ignore it. But perhaps I can leap 
over the middens it leaves in its wake.

-Joel


On 7/27/2014 12:06 PM, Edward Picot wrote:
> Joel -
>
> Don't get me started on the NHS. Of course the Tories are predisposed 
> towards selling things off and bringing in more and more private 
> provision in the interests of "efficiency" and "introducing 
> competition into the healthcare market" - they think that 
> privatisation and the competition are the answers to everything, 
> basically - and they're particularly keen on the idea that a lot of 
> healthcare problems can be solved by introducing lots and lots of 
> extra screening and vaccination/medication programmes, because 
> screening can be done by lots of non-NHS agencies (such as pharmacies) 
> and vaccination/medication programmes put vast amounts of money in the 
> pockets of their chums in the pharmaceuticals industry. (As an aside, 
> it's quite comical to see how desperate both the Government and the 
> pharmaceuticals industry are to find some evidence that "vaping" is 
> bad for your health, since at the moment it's starting to look like a 
> far more effective way to give up smoking than any tablet or nicotine 
> patch the drugs industry has managed to come up with, which means that 
> a huge loss of profits is on the cards.) However, the direction of 
> travel has been the same under both the Tories and Labour - the pace 
> of change may be different, and so may the way it's dressed up, but 
> basically they both perceive the problem in the same terms and seem to 
> be looking at the same limited range of solutions. Keep the punters 
> out of hospital at any cost - dismantle the hospitals and move care 
> out of the hospitals into small clinics, GPs' surgeries and the wider 
> care community as much as you can.
>
> As someone who works in the NHS, the depressing thing is that once 
> every few years we get the "biggest reform of the NHS for a 
> generation", which means a dramatic rebuilding exercise and a period 
> of exhausting chaos and uncertainty; and when we start to emerge from 
> the other end of the process and things begin to settle down a bit 
> (which is where we are now) it's only to discover than none of the 
> savings the reorganisation was supposed to deliver have actually 
> materialised, the projected overspend is still pretty much the same as 
> it was before, and therefore the arseholes in Government and the 
> Department of Health are starting to eye up yet another huge 
> smash-and-rebuild exercise.
>
> Grrr....
>
> - Edward
>
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