On 2008-06-22 15:14:28 +0100, Roland Perry said:

In message 485d8aa0@qaanaaq, at 00:11:28 on Sun, 22 Jun 2008, Andy
Hall remarked:

It all depends what hourly rate the dentist needs to earn where he lives.
That would only set the bare minimum.
Minimum what?
Remuneration.
But for what lifestyle?

For the one that the market will support.

Perhaps the market (for dentistry) will only support an average
lifestyle, and the porsche-wannabes are now in the wrong profession.

Seemingly not. Certainly my dentist, others in his practice and
colleagues in other practices are filling their appointments at the
quite reasonable prices that they charge. They don't consider that
they are overcharging for what they do, and clearly their patients
don't either.




I wouldn't mind if people in London and the southeast had
significantly higher prescription charges and dental fees, to reflect
the higher delivery costs.

We already do. £7 for a prescription item is already £7 more than the
socialist promise of the 1940s. Some brave new world.......

Wrong answer. Would you pay £12 in the southeast, to reflect the higher
cost of premises for the retail pharmacists?

There is no reason to have retail pharmacists. That can be done on
line as well.


With only 10% of people paying for prescriptions, I do wonder why they
bother; so it must be to establish some sort of "benchmark" for people
who don't pay to know how much better off they are. To that end I'd be
very happy for NHS patients to be given a dummy bill that says roughly
how much their treatment cost, so maybe they'd be a little bit more
grateful.

Oh my God... Did you write the script for their radio advertising?
What is all this "being grateful" all about? People are paying
through the nose for this third rate service. Why should they be
grateful for it?



And in the context of prescriptions not waste the ones that do cost
large sums of money.

The PCT prescribing committees do a pretty good job of short changing
patients with regard to drugs and supplies.



Time in hospital can be counted in days, but there's no fee.

There's a huge fee, taken in tax, but you don't realise it.

There's an insurance premium paid to the government. What you don't get
is a dummy bill that says:

Heart bypass operation: £15,000
Three weeks in hospital: £21,000
Medication for the next three months: £3,000

So you know what payback you've had.

It's all very well people saying things like "that $WASTEDMONEY could
have paid for 10 hip replacements" when the public has no idea how much
a hip replacement actually costs.

There is some value in that notion. The private sector has all of this
transparently. The procedure figures are well documented.
However, doing it in the NHS may not achieve all that much in that it
is not going to affect behaviour.





But I agree that filling in an insurance claim form for every £50, 7
minute, GP appointment is a really good way to waste time and money.

I presume that you have never filled in a healthcare claim form or
initiated a claim.

I've done it the USA many times. Usually you have to do it before
they'll treat you.

Not here. Very simple.



All that I have to do is to pick up the phone, call the insurer and
give a description of the ailment. 30 seconds and there is approval
for three months. Done.

I've been sat in a UK private hospital with everything "arranged", and
then suddenly the admin people say "sorry we've not received the
go-ahead for some reason - do you want to give us your credit card
number, or to come back when we've clarified this with your insurer".

That is your fault, quite frankly. You should have checked the
details of the procedure and the facility in exactly the same way as
when selecting other goods and services. Even with that, it's
perfectly possible to call the insurer and they will issue the
authorisation immediately




But they can break even as long as they don't have Mercs?
That's the sort of thing, yes. And as you agreed in your reply, having
the latest Merc when you can't afford it is very much a
self-inflicted injury.
Circular argument. Why shouldn't it be possible for a dentist to
afford a Merc if they want one?
Or a road sweeper. (Own a Merc, not a dentist own a road sweeper!)

Huh?

Why does a dentist deserve a Merc if a road sweeper doesn't?

Because his customers are willing to pay the amount of money that will
allow him to have a Merc. The road sweeper's customers are not.

During the communist era in Romania, there was social engineering along
these lines. A person could own one major thing - typically a car or
an apartment but not both. The logic ran that if they did they must
be on the fiddle.

However, as soon as it became possible for the people to string up the
perpetrator of this, they did. It seems that this fluffy or not so
fluffy socialism isn't very popular.




The Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as it costs to run the NHS.

Citation?

It's a fairly well known statisitc, usually expressed as percentage of
GDP, I think.

Mmm....


And that's before you allow for the fact that a large proportion of
the public can't afford healthcare at all (so aren't spending anything).

Reference?

Again, there are many reports bemoaning the situation.

Mmm...



I've had no issues with medical insurance companies at all. What is
your personal experience of them?

Too many to list. But includes absolute bans on certain courses of
treatment, bans on treatment for some pre-existing conditions, delays
in getting approval for treatment etc.

This depends on the insurer and on the policy.



Have you tried quibbling with an American insurance company? I've done
both, and the NHS is easier every time.

Have you tried claiming from a UK insurer?

Yes. And they eventually paid, although bizarrely the consultant they
were paying me to see recommended that I would get better treatment
through the NHS than through the "ingrowing toenail motel" that was the
private sector's offering. Having found an NHS consultant (who happened
to work in a different town) he was also of the view that treatment
would be better delivered in his NHS hospital than anything he could
offer wearing his different hat in the private system.

There are consultants like that. They ought to decide where they
really want to work.