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[hector13]

I think British people are quite happy to not go into debt whenever they get sick, positively correlating with the extent to which they get sick.

Like, I live in the US, I’m a British citizen. If I get sick enough that it requires extended treatment, I will spend the pennies on a plane ticket because fuck the noise that is health insurance premiums and deductibles.

This is the reason why the Tories are harping on about the NHS not being up for sale in a future US-UK trade agreement, because that would be political suicide on their part.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

In spite of the fact that the Ories are definitely going to sell the NHS in a post-Brexit trade agreement. They just have to get through the food riots phase with enough boomers still alive, and then with that crisis in mind can just say Britain can no longer afford the fiscal irresponsibility of the NHS which has plagued it for decades.

[Loud Whispers]

Nah, they won't even say that. It'll just be an efficient restructuring for cost-saving proposals that'll streamline our world class services with a string of nice buzzwords

[ChairmanPoo]

Like I said, they'll probably "externalize management"

[hector13]

Didn’t take the British politicians long to politicize a tragedy.

[Loud Whispers]

Gotta be tough on hate, terror and other emotions^TM

[Iduno]

NHS fun fact - the accounting and statistics-related arm of the NHS (not an easy group to define, there are hazy borders so forgive me) consumes at least 5-10% (lowballing) of the annual budget, likely substantially more. In France there exists a far less comprehensive level of statistics with respect to exact spending per patient and spending per GP practice,hospital etc.  Here's the thing - employing people to find inefficiencies in the system is good but, if you go into too much detail, the costs of knowing begin to outweigh the increased efficiency. Sure the GP practice could save £5 by better distributing resources so they're not wasted, but it might cost £10 to catalogue and know exactly which resources are where. There's a middle-ground to strike, and the Conservative method of NHS management seems to have upped the needless bureaucracy arm to 11 imo. What DF and many other games fail on a massive scale to show you is that statistics aren't free.

For a more glaring example: in the US (and probably elsewhere), companies and government agencies buy through a contract to make sure people are not taking bribes in order to pay extra. These contracts usually involve buying things for 400-500% of the normal price for the exact same item, and forbids buying through non-contract options.

[Loud Whispers]

There's a common joke on Yes Minister, where the government minister tries to make the government more cost-efficient so they hire more civil servants to investigate how to make the government more cost-efficient

Also in completely unrelated news, I find it amusing that I had far too many students in their 40s and 50s who denied animals are going extinct today, while I just read a translated extract from a Greek 1,600 years ago complaining that lions had gone extinct in Europe

The Greeks were really ahead of their time

[scriver]

We used to have elephants

elephants

Super cure elephants

[ChairmanPoo]

Elephants? We used to have wooly mammoths. 

[Naturegirl1999]

We used to have ground sloths

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Well. Tomorrow's the day.

Come good or ill, here's to you, Jezza.

[scriver]

We used to have ground sloths

I haven't climbed up into a tree yet

[ChairmanPoo]

Back in the day we didn't climb down from trees

[Iduno]

Back in the day we didn't climb down from trees

Even the trees were a bad move. No one should have left the oceans.