Brexit

[mbaginy]

I've never come across anyone without heath cover in Germany and I do have a lot of close German friends.  If you are too poor then the state provides QED

Omegadeep, it seems the numbers have changed since the last report I watched on TV.  There seem to be some 80,000 persons without health insurance.  Here's the report I just view (it's a year old though): Krankenversicherte

You have quite a medical history.  I wish you the best.

By the way, what is QED?

[Alan Klein]

Omegadeep,  Sorry to hear of all the medical issues you have and hope it all works out.  Now go out and shoot some pictures.

[omegadeep]

Thanks for all the well wishes - Just playing with a new toy actually since I sold one of my two 5D mk iii cameras and bought a Lumix GX8 with a couple of lenses for street shooting. Great camera with an EVF that's amazing.

TV reports - never trusted them because they are, or can be very bias, depending on the producer.   I can only say what I know from experience, but who knows what is going on at this very moment. Just talked to a good friend of mine in Lubeck, and she has never heard of anyone either not being insured or covered by the state for health care.  As I said, worst case, if it exists, claim unemployment benefit and be covered. At least here and in some other European countries these is very little paperwork if indeed any. Here once you are in the system here that's it for life.  When I go back into therapy I need to claim Employment Support Allowance in the Support Group of £109.30 per week because of my cancer and I'd be entitled to free hospital transport if my treatment affected my ability to drive.

QED   Latin - quod erat demonstrandum    sort of means that is my statement as I've demonstrated  - end of......   

Happy shooting guys

[omegadeep]

This might interest some, but not others     Nobody really understands the way in which the NHS works, and I really do mean that.  This is because it has grown organically since 1948 and every attempt to alter the way it works by Government normally ends in disaster or costing more money than it saves - this will gives some clues, but is the tip of the iceberg and a lot isn't even mentioned.

https://youtu.be/8CSp6HsQVtw

I would point out that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands have their own systems run by respective Governments in those parts of the UK. But essentially, the systems are the same, just under control of national governments.

[Jeremy Roussak]

In the UK the Health Service is paid for through general taxation at 20% base above UKL 11,000 p.a. 40% above UKL 43,000 p.a and 45% above UKL 150,000 p.a. and National Insurance paid as either a percentage of gross pay or rates as low as UKL 2.60 a week for self employed.  Free at point of delivery, no forms, no signatures just an NHS number given at birth.

Income tax is a little more complicated than that: for example, there's a marginal rate of 55% for incomes between £100k and £122k, as £1 of tax-free allowance is lost for each £2 earned. Value added tax (VAT) also goes into the general melting pot, as does various other forms of taxation (vehicle excise duty being an obvious example).

And while it's true that most healthcare is free at the point of delivery, that doesn't apply to dentistry (which is merely subsidised) or to drugs, for which a standard "per item" prescription charge applies.

Jeremy

[myotis]

...or to drugs, for which a standard "per item" prescription charge applies.
Jeremy

But, as in my earlier post, only in England and even then only up to 60 years old, after that they are free. And they are free in Scotland and Wales for any age. And in England, if you have more than two prescriptions per  month, you can save money by paying a fixed annual fee to NHS England.

Cheers,

Graham

[Rhossydd]

Value added tax (VAT) also goes into the general melting pot, as does various other forms of taxation (vehicle excise duty being an obvious example).

It's easier to say that the NHS is funded by all government income, so add corporation tax, import duty etc. etc.

And while it's true that most healthcare is free at the point of delivery, that doesn't ----- or to drugs, for which a standard "per item" prescription charge applies.

For the clarification of those unfamiliar with the NHS, it's worth mentioning that the prescription charge is only an administrative fee for the dispensing of the drug and isn't related to the cost of the drug at all. There's also a pre-payment option for those needing drugs long term which limits the annual cost to £104pa until the age 60 after which they are free.
Drugs delivered in hospital are also free.

[omegadeep]

All my medication is totally free without prescription charges since I've been a cancer patient in the last 5 years. I currently have eye drops for dry eyes, painkillers for my missing shoulder socket and one or two other meds. My wife is on Thyroxin and HRT, meaning all her scripts are totally free and currently 88% of all prescriptions that are dispensed in the NHS England area are free of the £8.40 charge.

[omegadeep]

Income tax is a little more complicated than that: for example, there's a marginal rate of 55% for incomes between £100k and £122k, as £1 of tax-free allowance is lost for each £2 earned. Value added tax (VAT) also goes into the general melting pot, as does various other forms of taxation (vehicle excise duty being an obvious example).

And while it's true that most healthcare is free at the point of delivery, that doesn't apply to dentistry (which is merely subsidised) or to drugs, for which a standard "per item" prescription charge applies.

Jeremy

NHS dental charges

There are three NHS charge bands:
Band 1: £19.70 covers an examination, diagnosis and advice. If necessary, it also includes X-rays, a scale and polish and planning for further treatment.
Band 2: £53.90 covers all treatment covered by Band 1, plus additional treatment, such as fillings, root canal treatment and removing teeth (extractions).
Band 3: £233.70 covers all treatment covered by Bands 1 and 2, plus more complex procedures, such as crowns, dentures and bridges.

But free to many on benefits or reduced costs to those with limited incomes.

[Manoli]

https://publiclawforeveryone.com/2016/12/01/explainer-miller-in-the-supreme-court-the-key-arguments/

[Rob C]

Yep, there are the post-Brexit medical worries ever haunting the mind of expats, but they don't stop there. In a market very much dependent on the buying of second homes, those of us trying to sell our only one are finding it an ever unlikely event unless we are in the "over a million euros" price band, where the supply cam't meet demand, such is the current thirst to offload sterling in favour of real estate.

I thought this caught the zeitgeist:



Rob

[RSL]

Fine shot, Rob. Good street.

[Rob C]

Fine shot, Rob. Good street.

Thank you Russ, I have developed an appetite for it, but lack the confrontational ability that goes with the territory! Hence the love for my 180mm or the chicken-liver approach as here: shoot 'em in the back! But hey, shoot 'em anyway!

;-)

Rob

[Jeremy Roussak]

https://publiclawforeveryone.com/2016/12/01/explainer-miller-in-the-supreme-court-the-key-arguments/

It's an interesting, neutral article. One difficulty with the claimant's argument is that "rights" have not been a significant feature of English law, whose general principle has been that subjects may do anything as long as it is not prohibited, whether expressly or by implication. It wasn't particularly clear that any of the EEC/EC/EU acts were intended to affect that stance. The Human Rights Act 1998 certainly did, but of course that has nothing to do with the EU.

Jeremy

[Manoli]

In case anyone is interested in following the proceedings, live
https://www.supremecourt.uk/live/court-01.html

[Alan Klein]

Trump and Renzi have happened since Brexit.  Does that change anyone's thoughts on Brexit?

[pegelli]

Trump and Renzi have happened since Brexit.  Does that change anyone's thoughts on Brexit?

Also Van der Bellen happened, a more surprising result (especially the magnitude) then what happened in Italy.
In my mind all these three things don't change a thing how I think about Brexit.
The Brits voted to leave, so they will probably leave, unless they take a different decision down the road.
Only the way in which the next steps will happen is in the hands of the supreme court.

[Rob C]

I still think Brexit is slow suicide as Brit spectator sport.

Our manufacturing arm is very strongly in the tender care of foreign owners; why would they want to stick around if we swim into troubling trade barriers when they can easily relocate within warm and welcoming embraces elsewhere?

Our main strength, finance, is being systematically attacked from all competing sides that formerly hadn't a snowball's chance of catching up and surpassing us; today, our mass stupidiy and voluntary blindness, certainly mixed with hatred for the richer members of society (naturally, and by birth-conditioning), is cutting off the single biggest asset we have. Well, done, clever in the extreme. Buy hey, we shall be free! Free form what tyranny, exactly, isn't clear (it never is), but you have only to listen to every war video of marching refugees, citizens out of Aleppo or anywhere else to hear the mindless chant, the mantra. It has often been said that the only freedom is death; perhaps today more accept it, despite having absolutely no idea where the next step, if there be one, will lead them and us. To save face and street rioting, and in the hope of keeping those factories open, the British government will lower corporate taxation to almost nothing, perhaps indeed keeping factories in the country, but reducing tax income, thus creating even more lack of finacial resources to keep those same streets in sublime serenity.

As for the States, well, I'm sure that it will end up as just another bit of showbiz, exactly like everything that has gone before. Book your seats for the movie today.

Russia? Perhaps it will find a new friendship with the States, plot a way to share out the European spoils which currently reside in Silicon Valley; in Louisville, Kentucky; in Atlanta, Georgia and Des Plaines, Illionois, and not forgetting Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan. Anyway, if Europe falls into poverty and destitution, who wants to hold control and responsibilty for and of it? Without its money it's nothing but mouths to feed, mouths talking in ever more different languages. Star Wars on Earth.

Innit gonna be fun?

Rob

[Manoli]

Rob,

You're too pessimistic. The fun has only just begun and we're nowhere nearer to EU exit than the NHS is better off by 350 million a week. Supreme Court has come and gone and now we wait for January ...

Last week AA Gill passed away from cancer at the age of 62. Among the many tributes and obituaries, an Irish Law firm published one of his pre-referendum articles  (http://dndlaw.com/aa-gill-on-brexit/).
Reproduced below for posterity ...

[Manoli]

“It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”

It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”

Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.

All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.

There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.

The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.

Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is worse now than at some point in the foggy past where we achieved peak Blighty

We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.

Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”
When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us. The tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the first place.

Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’

You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care about; it makes not a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.

Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and different opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.

The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.

No time for walls: the best of Europe, from its music and food to IM Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, depends on an easy collision of cultures

There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests, expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and exciting.

The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.

Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?

I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in.”

AA Gill | 16-Jun-2016