Leatherhead Matters

What sort of society have we become….. when over half a million children a year are referred to the Child Protection Agency?

As Camila Batmanghelidj of Kids Company points out (Children are not born criminals or killers), as these kids grow up “they know how to kick because they have been kicked, they know how to stab because they have been stabbed, they know how to torment and humiliate because they have experienced the same.”……and so we lay the foundations for future horrors, like the recent murder of Gary Newlove.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said “There is no such thing as society!”. The present Government have institutionalised this by ensuring the State meddles in everything. We are all now suffering the consequences of wholesale individual & community abdication because, the government have tilted the balance. Not only have the Government established an expectation that they alone can step in and resolve issues of feral kids on our streets and violence in our communities but, they now use the powers of state to protect their monopoly. We have all learned that a public spirited individual who intervenes to stop youths vandalising, abusing or, assaulting others is now automatically put in the position of the accused. The state has neutered one positive force from establishing community cohesion and has become negligent in carrying out its own monopoly role…. as has been reported re Gary Newlove’s killer, Adam Swelling

When the state once again supports reasonable interventions by individual citizens and protects them afterwards from reprisals we will be starting down a path of reducing the present blight on civilised society in our country.

    A decade as Prime Minister is a lifetime

Tony Blair Campaigning April 1997        

        Tony Blair Official Portrait December 2007

The Commons public accounts committee wants GPs to use cheaper, more generic drugs instead of expensive, branded ones. They also suggest putting the cost of the drug on the package to discourage waste.

Is this a good idea? I’m not sure it is!

Apparently the typical GP now prescribes an average of 14 items per person a year - at an average cost of £11 per item.

The National Audit Office has estimated that £200m a year could be saved without affecting patient care by GPs prescribing lower cost but, equally effective treatments. This is about 2.5% of the annual NHS’s expenditure. currently running at £8.2billion/year.

Mandating the use of generic drugs is a good idea in principle but, a bad idea in practice.

Putting the GP in the role of prescribing the cheapest rather than the most effective & with fewest side effects is doomed to failure. Even though the pharmaceutical industry is not allowed to advertise to the UK public they can and do pitch their drugs to GPs. Taking drug prescription choice away from GPs puts someone in Whitehall in the role. More centralisation…….surely this government has proven to destruction that this doesn’t work, when differences in people’s needs & circumstances have to be taken into account.

Dr Crippen believes that pharmaceutical industry advertising does influence GPs prescribing choices. He says that his practice stopped the drug reps calling a decade ago so, where do GPs like Dr Crippen get their advice on which drugs to prescribe…perhaps he will tell us?

Many patients are now Internet savvy and research their diagnosed condition and appropriate medication. Obviously this is no substitute for the expertise of a GP.  However, there must be significant pressure on UK GPs to prescribe branded drugs which patients have become aware of via the Internet. How does a GP resist this pressure? Well I suppose s/he can advise the patient there is no difference. Ok says the patient I’ll take the branded one then. Or, the GP could say there is no difference and the generic ones are cheaper (particularly if the price is on the packet). Ok says the patient, if the branded ones are more expensive they MUST be better . Obviously not all patients are so demanding! However, who would want to be a GP with no discretion on what to prescribe?

The Government is still peddling a vision of the NHS which is a farrago:

1. Free at the point of demand
2. Responsive to patient’s wishes and demands
3. State funded via a centrally determined annual budget which inevitably means healthcare has to be rationed by some mechanism and therefore cannot satisfy expectations created by “2″.

Any future government is going to have to face up to more effective ways of integrating some defined level of State funded healthcare and privately funded healthcare (perhaps via tax deductible private health insurance).

Read more in “2008 - The End of Our Love Affair With the NHS“.