What should the highest marginal tax rate be for any personal income

[TooNice]

Isn't plastic surgery already excluded from NHS coverage? And 100% of what? Current NHS? 250% of free is still free ^^; Private care? Wouldn't make sense..

On a side note I went to the A&E with a "cough" and fever twice during a rather unpleasant episode. GP wouldn't see me because it was during the swine flu period and no one would see me apart from a kind nurse practitioner outside my regular practice who (rightfully) diagnosed that it was unlikely the swine flu and sent me to A&E with a reference letter to get a blood test. The first time I went there, they ignored the letter, refused to conduct a blood test, and only after lots of begging did they allow me to see a GP who just sent me home with some ibuprofen (even though I said that I have already been taking them for over a week). Obviously their ibuprofen was no different than the one I was taking, and my fever did nothing more than raise some more. The next time I went there, I was almost too weak to make it to the hospital by myself (downside to living alone I guess), I could barely make sense of what was going on around me, and they finally had to take care of me unless they wanted a corpse on their floor. Once they got into action, they were pretty fast. A blood test later, a specialist informed me that I had.. no, not swine flu but pneumonia. To cure me, I ended up hospitalised for almost a week in a private room (they -did- try to discharge me on the third day after the first sign that I was getting better, but my fever shot back up before the end of the day). If I wasn't half dead I'd say that it was pretty nice.

Point being, what starts off as a cough can develop into a chest infection, which can develop into something even nastier/life threatening - and the earlier symptoms can easily be mistaken for a cold. In hindsight, maybe I should've gone private. Or they could've just treated me earlier, saving the cost of a specialist and a week's worth of inpatient care (or even the blood test had the GP seen me before I had to go to A&E in the first place).

[badass]

If you idea of being polite is to accuse someone of lying and implying they're stupid then you have a funny idea of being polite.

The post I was referring to which is my first response to you:

http://forums.hexus.net/general-disc...ml#post3698140

Your response which is your first comment directed at me:

http://forums.hexus.net/general-disc...ml#post3698155

Now grow up. Though at the age of 46 I suspect you are beyond that.

[peterb]

No, we have someone who takes offense when someone starts acting like a prepubescent teen because they can't be bothered to read the research that was cited in an article, an article that for the sake of trolling was taken out of context, that in some vain display of machismo was used to attack another forum goer.



Do you? Do you go around IRL speaking to people in the manner as you have in this thread?



Yes there is and it seems you can't do either, it seems you didn't read the evidence from the University of Michigan economists Matthew Shapiro and Miles Kimball, or the Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, or Felix Reichling and Charles Whalen from Macroeconomic Analysis Division in the Congressional Budget Office, instead you've choose to claim it's not evidence - it's conjecture.



If you idea of being polite is to accuse someone of lying and implying they're stupid then you have a funny idea of being polite.

The post I was referring to which is my first response to you:

http://forums.hexus.net/general-disc...ml#post3698140

Your response which is your first comment directed at me:

http://forums.hexus.net/general-disc...ml#post3698155

Now grow up. Though at the age of 46 I suspect you are beyond that.

<Puts on mods hat>

Guys, both of you are capable of better discussion than this...

[ik9000]

Isn't plastic surgery already excluded from NHS coverage? And 100% of what? Current NHS? 250% of free is still free ^^; Private care? Wouldn't make sense..

On a side note I went to the A&E with a "cough" and fever twice during a rather unpleasant episode. GP wouldn't see me because it was during the swine flu period and no one would see me apart from a kind nurse practitioner outside my regular practice who (rightfully) diagnosed that it was unlikely the swine flu and sent me to A&E with a reference letter to get a blood test. The first time I went there, they ignored the letter, refused to conduct a blood test, and only after lots of begging did they allow me to see a GP who just sent me home with some ibuprofen (even though I said that I have already been taking them for over a week). Obviously their ibuprofen was no different than the one I was taking, and my fever did nothing more than raise some more. The next time I went there, I was almost too weak to make it to the hospital by myself (downside to living alone I guess), I could barely make sense of what was going on around me, and they finally had to take care of me unless they wanted a corpse on their floor. Once they got into action, they were pretty fast. A blood test later, a specialist informed me that I had.. no, not swine flu but pneumonia. To cure me, I ended up hospitalised for almost a week in a private room (they -did- try to discharge me on the third day after the first sign that I was getting better, but my fever shot back up before the end of the day). If I wasn't half dead I'd say that it was pretty nice.

Point being, what starts off as a cough can develop into a chest infection, which can develop into something even nastier/life threatening - and the earlier symptoms can easily be mistaken for a cold. In hindsight, maybe I should've gone private. Or they could've just treated me earlier, saving the cost of a specialist and a week's worth of inpatient care (or even the blood test had the GP seen me before I had to go to A&E in the first place).

100% of what it actually COSTS to provide the care. And as for your anecdote, with a system where they would charge you if they did the test and found nothing wrong, you would probably be seen a lot quicker.

[TooNice]

100% of what it actually COSTS to provide the care.

Wouldn't that be quite hard to establish? Recently, I contacted a private sleep clinic for a rough on the cost for their services. Amongst other things, they quoted £350 to see a specialist. I later found from a GP friend that £350 is pretty much the standard cost for seeing a specialist (that the NHS would pay on your behalf). So it seems to me that private institutions do not necessarily have a much higher premium (into the 250% etc.), but you'd have to fit the bill yourself, and I don't think that it should ever be too punitive regardless of how we may not like people waste our limited resources. We really don't want people to ignore symptoms that may or may not be benign for fear of being hit a punitive charge, and later end up having to spend even more resources in an attempt to fix the problem at a more advanced stage.

[ik9000]

Wouldn't that be quite hard to establish? Recently, I contacted a private sleep clinic for a rough on the cost for their services. Amongst other things, they quoted £350 to see a specialist. I later found from a GP friend that £350 is pretty much the standard cost for seeing a specialist (that the NHS would pay on your behalf). So it seems to me that private institutions do not necessarily have a much higher premium (into the 250% etc.), but you'd have to fit the bill yourself, and I don't think that it should ever be too punitive regardless of how we may not like people waste our limited resources. We really don't want people to ignore symptoms that may or may not be benign for fear of being hit a punitive charge, and later end up having to spend even more resources in an attempt to fix the problem at a more advanced stage.

American health care, for all its faults, is able to itemise a person's health care charges - even down to the minutiae in some cases. We are quite able to do so if we want to. From close friends working in the NHS frontlines - it is very easy to know the repeat time wasters after a while. They keep coming back for one thing!

[TheAnimus]

American health care, for all its faults, is able to itemise a person's health care charges - even down to the minutiae in some cases. We are quite able to do so if we want to. From close friends working in the NHS frontlines - it is very easy to know the repeat time wasters after a while. They keep coming back for one thing!

Oooh, not they don't.

They cheat, everything is inflated. The insurance companies then pay a lower rate. It's a very odd kind of market behaviour that economists frequently write about, it's as far from a free market as you can reasonably get.

[SeriousSam]

Oooh, not they don't.

They cheat, everything is inflated. The insurance companies then pay a lower rate. It's a very odd kind of market behaviour that economists frequently write about, it's as far from a free market as you can reasonably get.

One of the classic wheezes used to be (and may still) charging for packs even if only one item was used.

[opel80uk]

Oooh, not they don't.

They cheat, everything is inflated. The insurance companies then pay a lower rate. It's a very odd kind of market behaviour that economists frequently write about, it's as far from a free market as you can reasonably get.

Well it's not that odd; as in many markets, such as the energy sector, they are effectively a cartel. And what's worse is it completely unsurprising because one of the fundamental principles that the Free Market was founded on was based on flawed logic, namely that by increasing the opportunities in any given sector you are able to lessen the impact unscrupulous owners/bosses would have on the market by opening up to all/anyone. That itself was based on the notion that, as it was thought that there were more good people in the world than bad, ergo, there would be more good bosses/owners and from that, more 'good' choices for customers. A lot of the classical Economists who were the most vocal early proponents of the Free Market were Christians who believed that the majority of people would adhere to what they, the proponents, believed to be the better, or more temperate, parts of the Bible and that would lead to a market which reflected the same values. Like proponents of Communism, they entirely misjudged human nature, and so when people say 'it's as far from a free market as you can reasonably get', what they actually mean is it's as far from the how the free market should work in principle, as you can get. In reality though, if you have even a basic understanding of human behaviour, it's entirely predictable that we end up with what we do.