whoops, video corrected

LOL, he sounds pissed.

He sounds pissed because he’s trying to talk posh to impress the Americans.

I think he put up a pretty good show. I doubt it will have even the slightest impact, but nothing wrong with the points he made.

Well done Prezza! A most punchy performance, I might add.

At least Briton’s trying to influence Americans have learned that the number one thing NOT to do is to tell the Americans WHAT to do!

Nobody wants a repeat of the Guardian’s 2004 letter-writing campaign…

A super job Mr Prescott! Super!

He Almost Sounds Like A Socialist.

How come the NHS is rated as so mediocre in performance compared with the social insurance schemes for personal healthcare costs in other west European countries?

“The World Health Organisation ranks Britain’s healthcare as 18th in the world, while the US is in 37th place.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/11/nhs-united-states-republican-health

Other independent assessments have reached similar conclusions – in comparison with healthcare in other west European countries, the NHS rates as mediocre:
http://www.healthpowerhouse.com/files/canadaIndex03.pdf

As a matter of public record:

“The NHS has seen a year-on-year fall in productivity despite the billions of pounds of investment in the service, latest figures show. The data from the Office for National Statistics showed a fall of 2% a year from 2001 to 2005 across the UK.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7610103.stm

Try: What Obama can lean from European healthcare, by Steven Hill
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-hill/what-obama-can-learn-from_b_173154.html

The French Health Care System
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/9994.php

Predictably, Prescott is so puffed up about hammering the Tories that he evades the crucial issue of how and why the NHS rates so poorly compared with healthcare in European mainland countries.

It may come as a terrible cultural shock to many but credit for first implementing a national insurance scheme for healthcare goes not to Britain for creating the NHS in 1948 but to Count Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Emprire.

“The Health Insurance bill . . was passed in 1883. The program was considered the least important from Bismarck’s point of view, and the least politically troublesome. The program was established to provide health care for the largest segment of the German workers. The health service was established on a local basis, with the cost divided between employers and the employed. The employers contributed 1/3rd, while the workers contributed 2/3rds . The minimum payments for medical treatment and Sick Pay for up to 13 weeks were legally fixed.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

Whatever else, Bismarck was no socialist.

Well said Prescott!

Mr Prescott highlights the dangers of giving statistics to people who don’t understand them.

He starts off with cancer deaths down 16% between 1997 and 2007. Great, so is that good or not? Well, we don’t know. Sure it’s a positive result, and it’s good to see cancer deaths coming down but how does the NHS’s improvement rate compare with other health systems? Could cancer deaths have come down by more under a different method of administering healthcare? Mr Prescott doesn’t say. So the statistics don’t have any bearing, one way or the other, with his argument that the NHS is the best system there is.

He sees a 16% drop and concludes that the NHS is brilliant. I see a 16% drop and I ask ‘how does that compare with other countries?’. 16% is just a number, for it to have meaning you must put it in context. Prescott does nothing of the sort (and in case you think I’m letting Hannan and Fox News off, I’d have liked to see the US equivalent waiting times on Glenn Beck because I have no idea whether a 12 months wait for knee replacement is good compared to the US or not).

“Could cancer deaths have come down by more under a different method of administering healthcare?”

Exactly. There was useful research on just this general issue at the LSE a few years back.

Pay is centrally negotiated in the NHS because it is managed by the Department of Health and provides what is verging on a monopoly supply of healthcare services. But centrally negotiated pay means hospitals and other supply units can’t respond to local labour market conditions.

The LSE researchers predicted that the ensuing difficulty of recruiting and retaining nursing staff in regions with strong labour markets would have worse medical outcomes than regions with weak labour markets where it is easier to recruit and retain nurses. And that is what they found:

“Hospitals in the north gain from a more stable pool of nurses. Southern ones have to lean on temporary agency nurses, who can be paid more but tend to be less experienced, less familiar with the hospital and less productive. Do southern patients suffer as a result?

“The economists look at the proportion of patients aged 55 or more, admitted to hospital after a heart attack, who die within 30 days. They find a strong link between this ratio and local private-sector wages. The higher the private wage, making it harder to get good nurses in the NHS, the higher the death rate: to be precise, if the private wage is 10% higher in one area than another, the death rate is 4-5% higher.”
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TDVGGRSS

The original research is posted here:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/ERD/pressAndInformationOffice/PDF/CanPayRegulationKilll.pdf