The "Care.Data" national health database has been postponed because in spite of the NHS apparently sending leaflets to every household in England (I can't remember receiving one) most people don't know about it. As, according to the BBC, there is a 66% chance you don't remember either, we will help you out.For balance, we offer you two videos at the bottom of this post:
1) From the NHS explaining what Care.Data is and why it is a good idea
2) From a YouTube video, forwarded to us by an old friend, explaining why it isn't. (This video starts off in a foreign language, but after 40 seconds moves into English).
The key issue is whether our personal data will remain confidential. What do we think? Well, confidentiality of this data will be maintained so long as you trust politicians
a) to stand up to the generous lobbying of those who would like to intrude into our confidentiality.
b) not to use the database to further cut public spending by filtering and selecting which of us will and won't get the benefits of public services and allowances.
There are those who will swear misuse of the data will never happen. But in February 2014 the Department of Health proposed that a patient's economic value should be taken into account when deciding on healthcare. Sir Andrew Dillon, head of the National Institute for Healthcare and Excellence (NICE, who set national healthcare budgets and priorities), disagreed saying:
"What we don't want to say is those 10 years you have between 70 and 80, although clearly you are not going to be working, are not going to be valuable to somebody.
Clearly they are. You might be doing all sorts of very useful things for your family or local society. That's what we are worried about and that's the problem with the Department of Health's calculation.
There are lots of people who adopt the fair-innings approach; 'you've had 70 years of life you've got to accept that society is going to bias its investments in younger people."Sir Andrew may resist. But you only have to look as far as the Department of Education's defenestration of the chair of OFSTED to see how easy it is to replace the Sir Andrews of this world.
Saving money by limiting healthcare for older people is easy - it's hard to hide your age. Will Care.Data make it hard to hide your aches from NHS accountants?
But we wouldn't want to influence you, so we won't tell you what we think. Just see the videos:
A MODEST PROPOSAL
ReplyDeleteIf the overriding priority is to get rid of the deficit, then we need to cut the big spenders: Work & Pensions: 147,676 (that’s over one hundred and forty seven a half billion pounds per year)
Health: 13,534 billion
Children, Schools & families: 10,346 billion
Defence: 8,848 billion
Dropping trident seems sensible as it is likely to be unusable as a nuclear deterrent but, as we can see from the figures, would make little impact on the size of our deficit. For that, we need to look at the big areas of spending: social security, work and pensions, health and children.
It is well understood that older people take up a larger proportion of healthcare expenditure than young people. They also require financing from the department overseeing pensions. A reduction in the proportion of pensioners to the number of working people would help redress this imbalance.
Social security payments to those without work are an enormous drain on the resources of the nation. Without new jobs being created as a result of the world recession, it is imperative that the government leads the way in innovating novel forms of employment for these people.
A policy of compulsory euthanasia would both reduce the number of pensioners and, at the same time, create easy-to-train alternative employment for young people in the nationwide network of beautifully-designed clinics, each celebrating the British flare for architectural design.
A government bill introducing this new relationship between the State and its citizens could have the following benefits:
1. Bring the deficit down to virtually nothing within the length of this parliament
2. Bring about almost full employment amongst the current young unemployed
3. Increase our export potential as other countries bought our eye-catching, clinic designs
4. Ensure faster travel as older road users would no longer hold up traffic, thus increasing productivity for hauliers and annihilating the usual excuse for tardiness in attending meetings
5. Virtually guaranteeing relieved survivors’ votes at the next election.
I would not object at the next election if this suggestion were adopted because – at my age – I would have been one of the first to attend the bright, new clinic.
Please tell me this is satirical....
DeleteGovernment also planning to sell taxpayer data from HMRC to private companies:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10775828/HMRC-plans-to-sell-taxpayers-data-to-private-firms.html