The Great Debate UK

The NHS: Back on the operating table

-Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.-

“The NHS – the envy of the world”. This is one of the Great British Myths to rank alongside “A-level standards haven’t fallen”.

It makes you wonder why all those rich well-organised Europeans are looking longingly at Britain – it’s not as though they can’t afford their own NHS. The truth of course is that they take one look and say “thanks, but no thanks”, and you can’t really blame them.

By most indicators, the NHS produces outcomes that are very unimpressive compared to our European neighbours and are in many cases inferior to those achieved in far poorer countries.

The fundamental problems of the NHS can be seen by simply examining the boasts of its defenders. One oft-repeated claim is that it is the second-biggest employer in Europe (or is it the world?), behind only…………….the Red Army! What this tells you loud and clear, apart from plenty about the speaker’s role-models, is that the NHS is simply far too big and far too complex an organisation for anyone to manage properly.

That the problems are managerial is confirmed indirectly by another frequently-heard boast.

When is the cost of drinking alcohol too high?

- John A. Cunningham is Canada research chair in brief interventions for addictive behaviours, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and a professor at the University of Toronto. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Whether you live in Britain, Canada, the U.S. or one of many other countries around the world, alcohol consumption is one of the leading causes of preventable death.

When people think about alcohol problems, the image of someone with severe drinking problems usually comes to mind.

However, one of the interesting facts about alcohol is that people with less severe drinking problems cause most alcohol-related problems in society.

This is because there are a lot of people with moderate drinking problems while those with severe alcohol dependence are relatively rare. Problem drinking comes in many shapes and sizes – from someone who misses work because of hangovers, gets into a fight while drunk, drinks before driving, or simply drinks too much year after year and causes long term health concerns.

One of the issues that troubles me about providing help for people who have problems with alcohol is that most do not get treatment, including Alcoholics Anonymous.

That is why I devised online screener www.CheckYourDrinking.net. The Check Your Drinking screener is a free, anonymous tool which anyone can use. Simply go online, answer some questions about drinking and a bit about who you are and get a personalized feedback report.

from The Great Debate:

America’s perennial Vietnam syndrome

--  Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

Prophetic words they were not. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula."

Thus spoke a euphoric President George H.W.Bush early in March, 1991, shortly after the 100-hour ground war that chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the oil-rich U.S. ally they had invaded and occupied in the summer of 1990.

The specter of Vietnam, far from being buried in the Arabian sands, has risen again as President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering the course of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year, increasingly unpopular, and considered unwinnable even by America's senior soldiers if it is fought alongside a corrupt government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

That the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well is obvious by the proliferation of analyses and commentaries drawing parallels, or dismissing them as nonsense, since Obama declared Afghanistan a war of necessity. (Type "Is Afghanistan Obama's Vietnam" into the Google search box and you get more than nine million references).

The cover of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine is taken up by an iconic photograph of the Vietnam war, people clambering up a ladder to a U.S. helicopter waiting to evacuate them off the roof of a Saigon building the day before the city fell to communist forces on April 30, 1975. The story inside: what to learn from the lessons of Vietnam.

The answers to that question differ widely and the Vietnam analogy has come up routinely whenever the United States resorted to military action in the past three decades, from Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq.  Obama himself has dismissed the parallel.

from DealZone:

‘New GM’ Gets a Visit from a Shareholder

“Think about it. If you are a member of the union right now, you’re spending all your time negotiating about health care. You need to be spending some time negotiating about wages, but you can’t do it," he said.

In fact, the UAW locked itself into a contract limiting wages and changes to health care, without the ability to negotiate with a threat of strike, until 2015. These stands were agreed to by the union at the prodding of the Obama administration, which demanded that union autoworkers accept lower wages -- as a condition to the bailout that saved Lordstown -- to match non-union workers at Toyota plants in Kentucky and Honda plants in Ohio.

Even so, Lordstown is something of a success story for both the UAW and GM, and Obama's remarks were punctuated with enthusiastic applause.  After winning deep concessions from the UAW in 2007, GM agreed to invest $500 million to retool the plant to make a new fuel-efficient small sedan, the Chevy Cruze.

from Commentaries:

Deficit hypocrisy

There's something scary about big numbers. It's one reason we in the media often like to put the biggest number we can find into a headline.

So it was no surprise that most media outlets went gaga over the Obama administration's projection that the nation's debt will grow by $9 trillion over the next decade. And sure enough, critics of the administration's efforts to reform healthcare were quick to seize on that scary number as another reason to advocate doing nothing.

But without wading into the muck of the current debate over healthcare reform, it's worth taking stock of just how much hypocrisy there is when it comes to the subject of government spending and those big bad deficits.

Let's start with the Republicans. They talk a good game about reining in federal spending, but they bear as much responsibility as the Democrats for the nation's $11 trillion in total debt.

It's sometimes hard to remember that when President Clinton left office in January 2001, the federal budget actually was in surplus. Yet by the time President Bush left town, the federal government was running a nearly a $1 trillion deficit thanks to spending on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the bank bailout and increased spending on prescription drug coverage for Medicare beneficiaries.

But the Republican deficit hawks didn't really start squawking about government spending until President Obama took office and proposed a $700 billion stimulus package for the ailing economy.

In reality, no political party can claim title to being prudent fiscal managers. All that talk about reducing the deficit often is just a wedge issue that gets used by politicians -- both Republican and Democratic -- to score points and torpedo legislative proposals they oppose.