HARBINGER

Herewith gleaned from  UKPublicSpending.co.uk    The facts such as they are - empirical data. Government Spending: the Details About 79 percent of public spending comes from the central government; About 21 percent is spent by local authorities. The  central government  is budgeted to spend £667.7 billion in FY 2020. Pension programs, including the state pension and civil service pensions, will cost about £161.1 billion; health care and the NHS will cost £143 billion; defence, including the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, will cost about £50.3 billion. Welfare, or Social Security, costs for the central government will come in at £71.4 billion, and central government education expenditures are budgeted at £44.6 billion. Interest on the national debt is estimated at £51.7 billion. We estimate  local authorities  will spend about £179.9 billion in FY 2020. The biggest expenditure is £54.8 billion for welfare. The...

Winter is here. And so the annual plethora of otiose ideological partisan cant and vacuous platitudes aka  the " NHS is in Crisis " discourse is once again under way. The answer to " will the NHS ever be out of a state of crisis?" appears after many decades to be; no. The only differences to be discerned amongst all the world's national health systems is the degree to which they are all in one way or another perceived to be " performing " or  functioning at a noticeably lower standard than any other arbitrarily chosen health system or systems to which they are compared at any point in time. For example ,the reputable body on such matters , The King's Fund posted online on June 8 2017,  ( herewith an extract gleaned )  from " How Does the NHS Compare Internationally ". " Although the UK has been at the forefront of the development of measures of health care quality (like the  national patient survey  programme) and the use of...