Err where is the national health system at in India exactly? Primary Healthcare is pretty much non-existent in most territories.

True. I don't care though. If they have developed more efficient hospitals than we have, and if they are willing to sell those to us, then we should be in the market to buy them.

Err.... they've managed to do that because they don't give any healthcare at all to a proportion of their population, who live and frequently die very young in abject poverty and squalor. If you're actually suggesting we just leave the poor and needy to fend for themselves you can, with all due respect, GTFO. It's quite easy to make hospitals efficient if you just can't be arsed any of the hard stuff like treat the elderly or the poor suffering from lifestyle-related illnesses.

We have universal health provision. That is non-negotiable. Any solution you suggest which violates that rule is simply not acceptable. The Indian 'solution' is simply the victory of greed and self-interest over basic human dignity.

Jon

Agreed.

India also have a Space Program but we still send Aid over to help feed its people. Hardly the shining example of how to use State funds.

Healthcare isn't a commodity it's a fundamental right we pay to keep going. People have to stop seeing it like a normal business, it's not.

Quite a lot of it is just like any normal business. Apart from the actual clinical requirements and the "coalface" it is like any other business, but because its been in the public sector and its such a highly emotive issue any reform (from any party!) is bound to fail due to politicians being too weak willed to actually reform it properly.

I see what you're saying, yes much of it is like any other business but what I'm saying is we should run it as one but not treat it as one.

If that makes any sense whatsoever?!?

I wasn't suggesting any such thing, nor did I say anything that even remotely justifies the inference. Due respect can be accorded by reading and comprehending what people write, not by saying "with all due repsect" and then spouting gibberish like that.


Edit - Oh I get it now. You thought that the complaint that India doesn't have a proper helath service was a relevant objection and that I was accepting and embracing this criticism. Alas not so. The reason I said that your comments about their lack of public health service was true, and that I don't care, is that it's a hopelessly obvious straw man argument.

I said that India has developed a number of frugal and highly effective hospitals run by the private sector and that we should look at importing this part of their healthcare model. To complain that this somehow means I want us to abandon all public healthcare and become a third world nation is no better than saying "they don't eat beef, shich would interfere with my steak and burger intake, therefore no". I assumed you didn't need me to tell you this.

Good lord. The reason their hospitals are efficient and frugal is because they don't have to treat a whole mass of conditions which come, basically, from being poor. From living in poor housing or having bad diet or having to work long hours in what we would consider unacceptable conditions.

Look at the cost of the NHS in the UK - the health service costs are massively weighted towards the lower end of the social scale. Those who don't have decent jobs and can't afford a decent lifestyle, the elderly on meagre pensions. If you only treat the rich, you have to deal with less heart disease, less diabetes, less cancer, fewer hip replacements, fewer pregnancies...

If you can't afford to be treated in India, you don't show up on the hospital's balance sheet. You're a zero cost. if you can afford to be treated, you're actually much less likely to be ill in the first place! No wonder their system is operating much better than ours. It's the perfect example of how a private system cherry picks the easy, profitable jobs and leaves the nasty, messy, expensive, unprofitable stuff to someone else (or in their case, nobody else).

We already have the 'Indian model' here - It's called BUPA. It makes a profit providing health care to rich, mostly healthy people. In fact it actively turns away unhealthy people (try getting BUPA cover if you have any kind of tricky pre-existing condition). It leaves the stuff that isn't profitable to the NHS which, amazingly, therefore doesn't make a profit. It's like being a fireman who only deals with cats up trees and leaves the burning buildings to the other fire station. Look how shiny his fire engine is! And how clean his uniform! And he manages to run his fire station on such a low budget! The other firestation must be run really badly...

You cannot take a system from an entirely different culture, with an entirely different expectation of level and universality of care and assume the results to be the same. To expect to be able to do so is startlingly naive.

Jon

We seem to be suffering an unecessary breakdown of comunications. MY reference to Indian private hospitals was not accidental, nor pointless. If BUPA was the model of hospital I meant, I would not have bothered to look so far abroad. A few years ago the NHS rules changed to conform with Euro rules, these favour European doctors over ones from the Commonwealth. This led to a large number of doctors floating around India with UK style training and in mant cases experience of the NHS, its benefits and its flaws. They saw an opportunity to create new and better managed hospitals at prices suited to their home market.

The result is nothing like the expensive hospitals typically provided by the private sector in the west.

I never said, nor even hinted that such hospitals should only treat the wealthy. The whole debate seems to be sailing over your head. It is about private healthcare providers supplying services TO THE NHS, not direct to the customer or any intermediary insurer. So I really don't know why you bothered typing most of that post.

I have been to a hospital in India. no sanitation, no privacy,no nurses, prices above what the majority of the population can afford. and what they call "hospital" is what we usually see as a surgery. You might have to do injections yourself as there are no nurses. Efficient!
Also the thing that bugged me in the original statement is the term "survival rate". It's all very well to have a high survival rate, but if patient wait so long for treatment that they are irremediably maimed and in pain for the rest of their life, why bother?

If we should look anywhere as to how to improve the NHS we should just take a peak at our neighbours in France.

Yes within Europe only.

Did I say that every hospital in India is awesome? It's a third world country, it would quite surprising if none of their public health infrastructure reflected this.

Are you people really incapable of understanding that when I recommend we consider importing a good idea from a third world nation, I am not saying that we need to also embrace their tendency to die of cholera and dysentery? We don't need to unpave all our roads and smash out indoor toilets. We just need to see if there's anything we can learn from some other stuff that they do well. They are not a nation of retards, they are capable of useful innovation.

The French already have private hospitals supplying services to their national health service. So that's fine with me. Of course they are also a nation of notorious hypochondriacs who demand antibiotics to treat such ailments as "heavy legs", a disease which exists only in that country.

Oh that was a private hospital, dispensaries are too unsafe.
and I'm sure they have very efficiently run hospitals. I don't see how they are relevant to the NHS problem though.