If you were the health minister, where would you make the cuts?

my first cut would be Boris JOhnson's 'air, macca.


this really needs some attention pronto.

Expand the private sector

I'd cut administration. Sack the workers with wishy washy job titles. Make the top job at a given hospital or trust to an actual doctor.

Then I'd charge fat people/alchoholics (but not smokers as they pay enough tax already) and sufferers others of any other medical conditions directly caused by their own choice of lifestyle over a prolonged period of time and wasnt just an accident.

Then I'd cut IVF, because more likely than not, the Earth doesn't need another one of you two and if you have been blessed with such good genes you wouldn't be infertile now would you?

Then I'd cut back treatments on the terminally ill because they're frankly incurable. As a sweetener pill, offer the next of kin 50% of what the hospital would have been expected to spend as treatment as cash in hand.

Now I'm no doctor or even a medical student but I think I'd do a pretty good job as the Health Minister.

Hey, Boris is great...

I know you're probably trolling, but I'd say approximately 99.9999% of illnesses are self-inflicted. Only a handful of congenital ones aren't.

I have little knowledge of the inner workings of NHS management, but as I think was pretty clearly shown in the run-up to the election managers as a whole are being exploited as scapegoats of waste and inefficiency, when there is a definite need for them.

Cut all funding for GKT

Absolutely

What does need to change though is the culture of mediocrity.
If you have a crap manager it is so difficult to fire them. Crazy difficult. So they end up getting promoted up or moved horizontally.
Meanwhile the really good managers don't seem to get anywhere, mainly because they get so sick of all the crap they just chose to stay someone isolated.

GKT no longer exists. So done.

Rubbish.

Have a look into how many lung cancers are smoking related.

Then do yourself (and future patients) a favou and flip it around. How many are NOT smoking related.

Well, I'd cut all funding for non-life threatening treatments

I was exaggerating, yeh. My point was that it is silly to suggest that the NHS only treat un-self-inflicted diseases because my belief is that the majority of things can be argued to be self-inflicted.

probably those advertising campaigns whereby the government spends my money telling me what I should and should not be eating.
Screw you, minihealth.

Would you prefer the government to spend more of your money treating you because of your own ignorance?

certainly not. IMO this is a compelling argument against socialised healthcare. or, at least, one for excluding from (free - maybe loans should be guaranteed or something) treatment those who caused their own illness.

it's not really the waste of money that i take issue with, though, as much as the principle.