jonattonyeah
OK I’ve finished eating and washing up so I can respond to this now lol. Irrespective of whether a service is already paid for or not, it still has a cost associated with it. I work in higher education and always have the argument made to me from academics “why should I cost my time into research proposals when ‘the University’ already pays my salary?” Often for multimillion / billion pound industrial companies
The reality is that the University is not paying for their time at all. It is essentially overseas student tuition fees subsidising the activity. Why should an overseas student be paying £25k of tuition fees a year so academic x can do research at a loss for a company like Google / Microsoft / Facebook/ GlaxoSmithKline who don’t want to pay the going rate based on a calculation of the time the academic is spending on their research? I’ll tell you something for nothing, the students aren’t getting the time they are paying for.
So back to the NHS. Why should the organisation not recover the cost of treating citizens from other countries in line with the reciprocal international agreements the countries have signed up to. Yes the service is already paid for by the UK taxpayer, but if you are paying out for the healthcare costs of your own citizens when they go abroad, surely it’s fucking madness not to be recovering your costs in the same way?
If we had a healthcare system where there were no waiting lists, an abundance of hospitals, beds, trained professionals to cope with the everyday needs of the country then sure. But not recovering hundreds of millions of pounds which could be used for new hospitals/ more staff / better equipment etc. is completely insane, no?
