The Pin Factory Blog

According to a front-page story in yesterday's Sunday Times, "A woman will be denied free National Health Service treatment for breast cancer if she seeks to improve her chances by paying privately for an additional drug."

Preventing patients from topping up their NHS care privately is standard practice in the UK, and in accordance with Department of Health guidance. The Department seems to think that you have to be either a private patient or an NHS patient, and that any mixing is unacceptable: "Co-payments would risk creating a two-tier health service and be in direct contravention with the principles and values of the NHS."

I find it sickening that the government persists in putting their Soviet-era ideology ahead of the health of patients (which is surely the ultimate principle and value of the national health service). Rather than challenging the wholly artificial and enormously damaging public/private divide in health services, they would rather we simply received a lower quality of care. Their position is immoral and impractical.

It is also incoherent. People can already pay for private rooms in NHS hospitals, and for other non-clinical benefits. If it's ok to pay extra for your own television set, why on earth should you not be allowed to pay extra for a better drug?

Most importantly, their position may be illegal. I was recently at a luncheon addressed by one of the UK's leading medical lawyers. His position was as follows: the NHS Act entitles you to receive care that you reasonably require. You can only be refused that care if there is some legitimate reason to do so. Limited resources is such a legitimate reason. But if you are willing to pay for an additional treatment yourself, resources are not an issue and no legitimate reason to deny the reasonably required treatment exists. Thus you should be free to top-up your NHS care with privately purchased treatment, without being forced to foot the bill for the NHS services as well.

Immoral, impractical, incoherent and possibly illegal. This is just the kind of thing we've come to expect from government.

A woman named Shirley was from Beverly Hills.
One day, she had a heart attack and was taken to Cedars Sinai hospital. While on the operating table, she had a near-death experience. She saw God and asked, "Is this it?"
God said, "No, you have another 30 to 40 years to live."
Upon her recovery, she decided to stay in the hospital and have collagen shots, cheek implants, a face lift, liposuction and breast augmentation. She even had someone dye her hair. She figured since she had another 30 to 40 years, she might as well make the most of it.
She walked out of Cedars Sinai lobby after the last operation and was killed by an ambulance speeding up to the hospital.
She arrived in front of God and said, "I thought you said I had another 30 to 40 years?"
God replied, "Shirley! I didn't recognize you!"

Last week on Tuesday evening a mother of two was threatened with violence during a burglary, whilst her husband was away at work. This had happened before in the area, and not just on one separate occasion but on a total of 6 (5 of which happened to colleagues of the mother's husband). The organization which they work for is now looking into arranging their own private security service to guard the property of their employees when they are away. All of this raises a simple question: where were the police?

It is not hard to imagine that the police force in question may have gone out on strike early, but in fact they hadn't. They were doing exactly what every other police force in the UK does, reacting to crime, rather than preventing it. The police force in Britain today does little of what we would demand of them. This modern force, that we allegedly have at our disposal, has become not much more than a political puppet shackled by the minutiae of centralized bureaucracy. This is the main reason why they failed to piece together the obvious pattern emerging in the case of the above burglaries.

The police themselves are culpable of nothing less than a simple dereliction of their basic duty: to protect the public. We want them to patrol our communities and prosecute successfully those that commit crimes. The public of Britain would hardly be in the wrong if they demanded that the police, should they strike, stay out. If other organizations are employing private security services due to the shortcomings of the state run offerings, then let competition burst forth. We could then have communities policed as they demanded and not for some politicians folly, and a reduction in the council tax bill as a service is privatized.

And yes, in case you were wondering, the mother and father in question were Alex Curran and Steven Gerrard.

But, but, what are we going to tell the children? That Santa has been banged up for multiple violations of the law?

Not one of the legal profession's finest hours : the use of blogs to get cases from the relatives of accident victims. Inventive, certainly, but not perhaps something to be all that proud of.

(Sweary alert) Yes, there are those in the environmental movement who really do think this way . 

Some photos: bring on the global warming, please , and just how vicious is that Russian bear ?  

Why environmentalism is even better than Marxism! 

An amusing story of blogs and copyright. Start here then here . And just for good measure, the Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics .

And finally , what the police actually spend their time doing. 

There is an interesting article in The Economist this week, which states "The Conservatives are doing well, but not well enough." That's probably a fair assessment.

The point is that despite the government's recent woes, and the sustained poll lead they have produced for Cameron's opposition, the Tories have not managed to really pull away from Labour. As The Economist notes, in 1995 Labour were scoring 60 percent, more than 30 percent ahead of the Tories. By contrast, Cameron's Conservatives are only averaging a ten-point lead, with 41 percent to Labour's 31. Of course, that is their best lead since 1992 and it represents a truly remarkable turn around from just a few months ago. But thanks to the structural unfairness of the British electoral system (the Conservatives need many more votes than Labour to win the same number of parliamentary seats) it is not yet enough to be sure of victory.

The main question for the Tories is, what can they do to propel themselves further ahead? The Economist points to two issues. The first is personnel - the shadow cabinet as a whole needs to perform better. Too many of them are completely unknown to the wider public, and do not seem to be particularly proactive. This is foolish: the Conservatives cannot simply hope for the government to lose the next election, they will have to work tirelessly to win it.

The second issue is policy. The problem is not, as is often suggested, that there isn't enough of it, or that it isn't detailed or radical enough. In fact, Cameron's policy commissions have provided him with a wealth of promising ideas, particularly on education and welfare reform (which may prove to be the most important challenges facing the next government). But what the Conservatives have not yet developed is an overarching theme or narrative that holds everything together and makes people understand just what a Tory government will be all about.

Ultimately, people vote for a vision, not for a handful of good policies. The challenge that remains for the Conservatives is making their vision the most attractive one on the market.

One night a burglar was trying to break into a house. He was sneaking across the lawn when he heard a voice - "Jesus is watching you!"
He jumped, turnedaround, but he didn't see anything. So he startedcreeping across the lawn again. "Jesus is watching you!" He heard it again.
Now the burglar was really looking around, and he saw a parrot in a cage by the side of the house. He said to the parrot, "Did you say that?"
The parrot answered "Yes I did."
So the burglar asked, "What's your name?"
The parrot said "Clarence."
The burglar said "What kind of stupid idiot would name his parrot Clarence?"
The parrot laughed and said, "The same stupid idiot that named his Rottweiler 'Jesus'"

How do you ostracise 30 million people? One simple way is to explain that, "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom... freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone." This is what Mitt Romney fundamentally did when he uttered those lines in his speech on the presidency and its relationship to belief. The Economist this week draws attention to the fact that there is a forgotten mass of people within the US who's votes are hardly ever courted.

Currently around 10 percent of Americans class themselves as being agnostic or atheist, a figure that has doubled in ten years. Unfortunately for them though they are a disparate group, and they are increasingly being forgotten. Especially as politicians are becoming more than happy to clothe themselves in religiosity as a way of proving that they are trustworthy and honest. (Even though the innumerable scandals prove that many are ordinary fallible human beings.)

Those who have no religious belief need to join together and begin to ask tough questions of those seeking election to office. There is a rightful place in the political arena for them, especially as a voice against those who seek to hold back scientific advances in the name of religion.

Mitt Romney et al. need to realise, as George Bush did, that even people without faith are Americans and that they, and their views, need to be incorporated into campaigns and politics. Religious belief, or lack of it, should never be a reason for exclusion from the political process. Having said that, we are surely light years away from ever seeing an unbelieving president.

We don't always make fun of Polly Toynbee around here but this is too good to not mention: the lump of indignation fallacy . This is good too .

On iron fertilisation of the oceans as a way of sequestering CO2: might we in fact already have done the experiment? The iron contained in coal burnt by all those ships a century ago?

Perhaps adapatation to a low carbon economy won't be all that difficult (given enough time)?  

Iain Dale's decided to, umm, well, you've got to admit it's a pretty neat idea , don't you? 

The Victorian principles of policing :  Netsmith didn't recognise any of them in the modern forces but perhaps you can do better?

So just how well paid are public sector chief executives? As compared with private sector ones ? 

And finally, those who speak Spanish might like to go here , those who don't, read this . 

Venezuelan Interior Minister Pedro Carreno was momentarily at a loss
for words when a journalist interrupted his speech and asked if it was
not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and
a tie made by Parisian luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.

Snigger. 

Not long ago Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and Law & Order star, was the great hope of many US Republicans, who excitedly compared him to Ronald Reagan and willed him to run for president. But since announcing his candidacy, Thompson's campaign has been lacklustre at best.
Yet the criticism most often levelled at Thompson – that he is just a TV personality – is unfair.

If anything, his policy platform and his commitment to small government principles are stronger than his competitors', while it is his media skills that have proved surprisingly disappointing.

His tax plan illustrates this perfectly. Having announced the policy on Fox News, he didn't make a single public appearance for three days and his plan sank without trace, which is a great shame, since it is extremely promising and would undoubtedly appeal to Republican voters if only they knew about it.
Thompson would permanently extend the Bush tax cuts (which have done much to keep the US economy afloat) and reduce corporation tax from 35 to 27 percent – a vital move for America's global competitiveness. The death tax would be abolished, as would the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was meant to hit the rich but now catches countless middle-income Americans in its net.

Best of all, Thompson proposes a new, alternative income tax code, which people could choose to opt into. Instead of the complexities of the existing system, people could choose a simple $15,000 personal allowance, paying 10 percent on their next $35,000, and 25 percent on everything over $50,000.

Eventually, I suspect most people would opt for this simpler tax code, and the US would have shifted to a simpler, flatter tax system without ever fighting major political battles over the removal of popular complexities. It's a clever policy, and one that could work this side of the Atlantic too.

It goes to show: Fred Thompson has plenty of potential. He just needs to raise his game before it's too late.

Kimberly Strassel, in the Wall Street Journal, and Quin Hillyer, in the American Spectator, have good pieces on Thompson here and here.

Peter, who was in a lot of pain, called his doctor's office for an appointment.
"I'm sorry," said the receptionist, "but we can't fit you in for at least two weeks."
"Two weeks!" the man replied. "But I could be dead by then."
The receptionist replied, "No problem, sir. If your wife calls the surgery we can cancel the appointment."