[celticninja]

What is the point re the health service? We should be enriching people like musk instead of looking after the health of citizens? We spend money on loads of stuff just wondering why you think the NHS needs to be singled out as if it is using resources that could be used to find space exploration/launches.

[nradov]

Healthcare is a bottomless pit. Demand is effectively infinite so no amount of funding will ever be enough. That's not to say we should eliminate it, but there has to be a balance. We shouldn't dump so many resources into healthcare that it strangles other sectors like space launch that are pushing human society forward for the long term. Whether that enriches certain individuals or not is completely irrelevant.

And you present a false choice. No matter what it does, the NHS can only ever have a relatively minor impact on the health of UK citizens. In terms of lifespan — and more importantly healthspan — it's less significant than lifestyle factors: exercise, diet, substance abuse, sleep hygiene, violence, toxin exposure, etc.

[wat10000]

The listed figure is about 3,500£ per year per person. Seems quite low for what it is.

For comparison, the US government spends something like $5,500 per year per person on health care, and doesn't come even remotely close to covering the entire population with that spending.

[nradov]

OK, so what? The US also has a much higher GDP per capital and is the world leader in pretty much everything related to space. If the UK wants to avoid being left behind then they need to adjust priorities. Or they can stick with stagnation.

[wat10000]

The point is that this "bottomless pit" you describe is not actually very expensive in practice. You imply that too much is spent on the NHS. Based on what?

[nephihaha]

As I was saying the other day, I think the main problem with the NHS is misallocation of funds. It receives a lot of money and has some good buildings (when it doesn't sell them off), yet that doesn't always translate into good patient care.

However the notion that we have a binary choice between American style healthcare where you pay through the nose and the NHS where you wait for years is a false one. It would be better to study continental Europe and Japan maybe.

[nradov]

If the UK wants to have a place in the future global economy then they're spending too much on things other than space launch. The NHS is one of those other things. In order to achieve different results they would have to reallocate spending priorities, and generally shift from a managed decline policy back to a growth policy. But if UK citizens prefer to have continued stagnation then that's also an option.

[nephihaha]

The UK is part of the ESA, and has a space port plan for Caithness.

[cs02rm0]

The NHS consumes about half of all day to day public service spending. It is singular in its ability to suck spending out of UK government.

[dtf]

That seems like a lot. Can I ask where you got that figure? Is "day-to-day" denoting some kind of specific budget?

I just tried to Google it and their AI responded with "The NHS and social care account for roughly half (49%) of all day-to-day public service spending controlled by the Westminster government.", linking me to a report from the The King's Fund [1].

But on reading that report, it seems to say only that 49.5% is the cost of staffing the NHS from its own budget, which it states as £205 billion in 2024/25 - that's more like 20% of the year's public spending [2]. Which seems more in line with what I had assumed.

[1] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-c...

[2] https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/BriefGuide-M23.pdf

[nickdothutton]

Out of all day to day government spending on services (health, schools, police, courts, etc), the NHS consumes about 40% of departmental expenditure limits [1]. Although it is pre-covid and the picture has worsened significantly since then, this BBC article is quite good too at examining the different figures [2].

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta... (Diagram in section 2.2) [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42572110

[cs02rm0]

It was widely covered at the time of the Spending Review last year, based on government figures.

Day-to-day is the routine, required cost of running the state, without long term infrastructure spending.

[cjrp]

How much of that comes right back to the government, in the form of tax income?

[cs02rm0]

I'd imagine a similar ballpark to any other day-to-day government spending. It might affect perception around the absolute number on the balance sheet, but it won't significantly affect the proportion of spending.

[badgersnake]

That’s the second C-suite I’ve seen on here today posting about how your entitlement to things should be directly proportional to your wealth.

Has a new memo gone out? Have we moved on from AI to ultracapitalism as the c-suite talking point?