Do you all know that Jeremy Hunt is cockney rhyming slang?

Limiting treatment to individuals for poor life decisions probably isn't the best way to prevent people from making those choices. It's an indirect long term cost that the individual is unlikely to fully realize while they are making that choice.

Directly taxing unhealthy decisions, or subsidizing healthy ones seems like a much better way to go about doing it.
The taxes one should be obvious, but subsidizing healthy decisions doesn't have to be in the form of direct government subsidies to healthy lifestyle choices...that could come with a whole bundle of it's own issues.
I did a hackathon for a health provider in Virginia. The idea my team had was to do something called proactive healthcare cost reductions.
Basically I used image recognition software to review grocery bills, tracked fitbit data, track gym memberships, and provided an API for people to do an opt in program to allow doctors to provide medical records like yearly physical examinations. It was a two day hackathon, so we didn't build the whole app, but we built a gui for a bit of it, and did the image recognition part. We didn't win the hackathon, it was too ambitious for the small health care provider to incorporate, but it was one of 2 runner ups.

Healthy lifestyle choices tend to create a positive feedback loop on the individual(same with unhealthy lifestyle choices) where constantly reminding yourself to say just eat a fruit in the morning, also tends to put you into a mindset that will make you less likely to want to smoke a cigarette, or drink a lot of beer, later in the day. That's assuming the individual recognizes the fruit as a healthy decision and the cigarette as an unhealthy one consciously.

I'm not an expert on this kind of stuff, that hackathon was my first real dive into the world of healthcare outside of casual reading, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. There are a lot of options out there, but limiting coverage to people who make poor decisions early in life that will only effect them much later in life, seems like a low hanging fruit that won't be particularly effective. It will just mean more suffering for people later in life, and it won't do a very good job disincentivizing young people from making poor decisions. If there were a liquidity issue in England right now I would understand needing to make tough choices, but I'm not sure that's the case.

(February 12, 2017 at 11:36 am)mh.brewer Wrote: Most people here rave about the NHS. What would you like to see different?

Not cutting back. A&Es have been shut across the country and wards have been slashed.
This is what happens whenever the tories get into power because everything is money first.
My department was given a mandate that it should save 20% of its running cost.
No look at what can be saved and provide a service just cut and sort out the problems later.
When you are so money fixated things stop being donwe and you just store up problems for later.

I'll say it once I'll it a million times the whole point of the health system is to help the sick .It doesn't matter how or why they are sick .There sick . Those who say this group of people or that group of people should not be helped miss the point

(February 12, 2017 at 12:37 pm)Opoponax Wrote: Still better than 'Murica health care. It's a land where people have to choose between sickness and bankruptcy so often that anyone who isn't for universal healthcare is either wealthy enough to pay for anything they and their family might need (which would constitute about 2% of the population) or they simply haven't yet had to suffer through such a decision.

Then there are people who simply choose to die because treatment would leave their family in dire financial straits.

Is any healthcare system perfect? Certainly not. But there are degrees of quality.

Tories are trying to turn it into Murrikan health care. Including Murrikan owners.

If it wasn't for the NHS I'd probably be dead.

The NHS needs more funding not less or myself and other people like me in the UK who can't afford any private whatsoever... are fucked.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39101489

Quote:NHS England is investigating whether any patients have been harmed by an administrative mix-up.

Some 500,000 documents containing medical information, including cancer test results, were mistakenly put in storage rather than being sent to the GP or filed in the patients' records.

An investigation is under way, focusing on the estimated 2,500 patients who may have been adversely affected and need further medical checks.

So far, no harm has been reported.

The error occurred when a mail redirection company hired by the NHS failed to pass on documents that had either been incorrectly addressed or needed re-routing because the patient had moved to a new GP surgery.

The company, NHS Shared Business Services, has expressed regret for the failings, which occurred between 2011 and 2016 in the East Midlands, the South West and north-east London.

(February 27, 2017 at 5:00 pm)Bella Morte Wrote: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39101489

Quote:NHS England is investigating whether any patients have been harmed by an administrative mix-up.

Some 500,000 documents containing medical information, including cancer test results, were mistakenly put in storage rather than being sent to the GP or filed in the patients' records.

An investigation is under way, focusing on the estimated 2,500 patients who may have been adversely affected and need further medical checks.

So far, no harm has been reported.

The error occurred when a mail redirection company hired by the NHS failed to pass on documents that had either been incorrectly addressed or needed re-routing because the patient had moved to a new GP surgery.

The company, NHS Shared Business Services, has expressed regret for the failings, which occurred between 2011 and 2016 in the East Midlands, the South West and north-east London.

Do they still have a contract?

(February 27, 2017 at 5:14 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: Do they still have a contract?

I have absolutely no idea.

(February 27, 2017 at 5:33 pm)Bella Morte Wrote:

(February 27, 2017 at 5:14 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: Do they still have a contract?

I have absolutely no idea.

Quick search says yes they do. Records management until 2020. Contract initiation date 2-13-2017.