Health And Social Care Bill: Fill & Download for Free

If given the choice, I would definitely go for one of the Nordic countries.America has its own demons, spawned by its ultra-capitalist approach - expensive real estate, education, healthcare, gun violence etc. India is fighting entrenched corruption, impossible competition, unsustainable levels of population, and residual misogyny and discrimination from the colonial era. China has problems with a totalitarian government, lack of fundamental rights, censorship, and overpopulation. Most large European economies are struggling with rising unemployment rates, stagnant/negative economic growth, political turmoil arising from the recent Brexit etc.However, the Nordics seem to have found the elusive panacea. They have managed to balance capitalism and socialism into a robust, sustainable model.A. Overall developmentAll 5 of them are in the top 11 as per the 2014 Human Development Index,All 5 of them are in the top 13 as per the 2015 Corruption Perception Index, indicating very low levels of corruption and cronyism.All 5 of them are in the top 20 in terms of GDP (PPP) per capita.All 5 of them are in the top 10 as per the World Happiness Report, indicating high GDP per capita, social support, high life expectancy, personal freedom etc.All 5 are rated lowest (lowest being best) in the 2015 Global Rights Index, indicating highly favorable working conditions for workers.B. EducationThere are a lot of issues with the education system of most of the countries - insanely high fees, too few good colleges, disconnect between what is taught vs what the job industry requires, unhealthy levels of competitions, focus on marks and grades instead of actual learning etc.Not the Nordics though.…Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.…in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.And the reason for their success can be summed up in one sentence.“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. “We are not much interested in PISA. It’s not what we are about.”C. Work-life balanceIn India, working overtime, on weekends, and during paid vacations is deemed desirable. People who stay later than everyone else are seen as hard-working and diligent. A 10–12 hour workday is commonplace.However, Sweden had, long ago, adopted the 6-hour workday. Less than 1% of the Swede population works for more than 50 hours each week. ~80% of working mothers in Denmark rejoin the work force after their kids start school.The parental leave policy is also quite flexible and generous.…Norway, Sweden and Iceland, which have adopted a so-called "daddy quota" that reserves part of the parental leave period exclusively for fathers: if Dad does not take his allotted period of leave, the family loses it.In Norway, the quota was introduced in 1993 and now totals 14 weeks. Mothers also have a 14-week quota, and the rest of the time (18 weeks on full salary, or 28 weeks on 80% salary), can be split as the parents choose.In Sweden, parents receive 480 days' leave – including 390 at around 80% of their salary – for each child, with 60 days reserved for each parent and the remaining 360 shared as the couple choose.Compare it to other major countries:The United StatesNo paid parental leave; a maximum of 12 weeks' unpaid parental leave for mothers and fathersAsia and the PacificThailand, Pakistan, Malaysia and several others offer no paternity leave. Australia allows partners to share up to 52 weeks of unpaid leave, Japan offers a year's unpaid leave to each parent, and South Korea gives allows both parents partially paid parental leave for up to one year.D. Welfare system and social securityEducation is free, funded primarily by the tax revenue. It ensures, among other things, that no one has to decline a particular college just because it is too expensive. Everything is based on merit. You qualify for a great college, you can study there.Universal healthcare ensures that something as basic as the right to be protected against diseases and accidents is provided to all, irrespective of their economic status. Hefty hospital bills wouldn’t run you down into a pile of debt.There’s a running joke about the US TV series, Breaking Bad, and how the American (and other similar) corporate healthcare structure screws people royally.E. Gender EqualityAlthough no country in the world has yet achieved gender equality, the Nordic countries consistently stand out in the World Economic Forum's annual Global Gender Gap Report, which measures how well countries are doing at removing the obstacles that hold women back.In this year's report, Iceland holds the top spot for the fifth consecutive year with Finland, Norway and Sweden following close behind. With the exception of Denmark, all Nordic countries have closed over 80 percent of the gender gap, making them useful as both role models and benchmarks.All Nordic countries reached 99 percent - 100 percent literacy for both sexes several decades ago, and girls fare just as well as boys in terms of access to primary and secondary education. At the tertiary level, in addition to very high levels of enrolment for both women and men, the education gender gap has been reversed and women now make up the majority of the high-skilled workforce. In Norway, Sweden and Iceland, there are over 1.5 women for every man enrolled in university, while in Finland and Denmark, women also make up the majority of those in tertiary education.Today, Sweden has among the highest percentages of women in parliament in the world (44.7 percent) while the other Nordic countries are almost as successful. Indeed, all the Nordic countries are in the top 10 for the number of women in parliament.F. Geography and CultureFinally, I love the natural beauty and the arts and culture of the Nordics. My second favorite band (after Pink Floyd) is the Icelandic post-rock beauty known as Sigur Ros.I would love to see them live, especially in a setting like the Heima concert. This, to me, is the perfect definition of a musical experience.I also plan to undertake a trip to Iceland sometime next year. It’s simply irresistible. It’ll be a mesmerising experience, lying on my bed at the Kaklauttanen, staring above at the starry night, and witnessing nature’s artistic talents in the form of the Aurora Borealis.

For Canada History of Canada’s Public Health Care1947The Saskatchewan Government, led by leader Tommy Douglas, introduces the first provincial hospital insurance program In Canada.1957Paul Martin Sr. introduces a national hospital insurance program. Doctors, insurance companies and big business fight against it.1960– The Canadian Medical Association opposes all publicly funded health care.1962Saskatchewan’s CCF government introduces the first public health care program. Doctors walk out but the strike collapses after 3 weeks.1965A Royal Commission appointed by Diefenbaker government and headed by Justice Emmett Hall calls for a universal and comprehensive national health insurance program.1966Pearson minority government creates a national public health care program with Ottawa paying 50% of provincial health costs. Prior to this point, doctors charged whatever they wanted and bankruptcy to pay for health care was..Read more1977Trudeau Liberals retreat from 50:50 cost-sharing and replace it with block funding.1978Doctors begin “extra-billing” to raise their incomes.1979The Canadian Labour Congress sponsored the conference SOS Medicare in Montreal. The attendees included Tommy Douglas, Emmett Hall, David Crombie and Monique Bégin. The Canadian Health Coalition was founded at the conference, formed by organizations representing..Read more1984Canada Health Act introduced by Trudeau’s health minister, Monique Begin, is passed unanimously by parliament. Extra-billing is banned. The act allows the federal government to deduct one dollar from federal transfers to any province for..Read more1995Paul Martin Jr. introduces Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), causing massive cuts in transfer payments to health and social programs. Health Care spending drops from 10.2% (in 1992) to 9.2% of GDP.1997Quebec introduces the country’s first mandatory pharmacare program.Health Minister Allan Rock releases the final report of the Krever Commission that looked into the tainted blood scandal infection of thousands of Canadians with the AIDS virus and hepatitis C is Canada’s worst- ever..Read moreNational Forum on Health calls for public health care to be expanded to include home care, Pharmacare and a phasing out of fee-for-service for doctors.1998Premiers demand a say in interpreting and enforcing the Canada Health Act, in return for support on constitutional change.1999Alberta Premier Ralph Klein announces his plan for private hospitals, with legislation to follow. Bill 11 is passed in 2000 and allows private clinics to specialize in a limited number of surgical operations.2001Senator Michael Kirby, Board member of Extendicare Inc. and personally invested in for-profit nursing homes, attempts to trump the upcoming Romanow Commission by starting his own.2002The Romanow Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada conducted cross-country public hearings. Final report was tabled in Ottawa on November 28, 2002. It called for: Creation of the Health Council of..Read more2003First Ministers’ meeting results in a ‘Health Accord.’ Targeted funding in keys areas (as prescribed by the Romanow report) shows promise. However, there are no accountability mechanisms and no strings attached (e.g. no restrictions on..Read more2005Jacque Chaoulli wins Supreme Court of Canada case. Evidence from the lower courts was ignored. Resulted in increased calls for a two-tiered private insurance and for-profit health care delivery.2006The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) elects Dr. Brian Day as President and begins a highly-public 4-year push to break Canada’s public health care system, and allowing extra-billing and double-dipping doctors. Split within CMA leads to..Read more2008Outspoken advocate for private, for-profit health care, Dr. Brian Day, and the Cambie Surgical Centre faces serious charges after a group of patients filed a legal petition seeking to have the provincial government enforce provincial..Read more2009Cambie Surgical Centre, the Specialist Referral Clinic and a consortium of other for-profit clinics, launched a constitutional challenge against the BC government.2012The federal government makes cuts to the Interim Federal Health Programme, cutting off access to treatment for chronic diseases including hypertension, angina, diabetes, high cholesterol, and lung disease for refugees.2013The federal government announces that it is terminating its funding of the Health Council of Canada. It was formed in 2003 following the Romanow Commission to provide the people of Canada with accountability, oversight, planning,..Read more2014The Health Accord expires. Without it, federal funds are given to the provinces and the territories with no strings attached. This means provinces and territories can spend the money however they like, often resulting is..Read moreJustice Anne Mactavish of the Federal Court deemed the changes to the Interim Federal Health Programme “cruel and unusual” to refugees and ordered the federal government to reverse those changes and restore the programme to..Read more2015The newly elected Trudeau government announces it withdraws the previous government’s appeal of the 2014 Federal Court decision that found Ottawa’s cuts to refugee health benefits were unconstitutional.2016Despite the recommendations from the Krever Commission and evidence from other countries which show a donor-remunerated plasma system will directly compete with our voluntary system, the Federal government grants a licence for the opening of..Read more

I’ve taken the summary from the Guardian: Labour party's plan to nationalise rail, mail and energy firmsHere’s what the Conservative spokesman said:“The commitments in this dossier will rack up tens of billions of extra borrowing for our families and will put Brexit negotiations at risk. Jobs will be lost, families will be hit and our economic security damaged for a generation if Jeremy Corbyn and the coalition of chaos are ever let anywhere near the keys to Downing Street.”Ah, public spending.It’s worth noting that, should Labour be elected, they will potentially face more expenditure than is in the final manifesto they produce.Infrastructure has been massively neglected by Tory austerity: school buildings are falling apart, the roads are covered in potholes, a good whack of NHS funding hasn’t gone into services, but rather the deficits held by trusts and commissioning groups.Should Corbyn take office it’s likely he will find more pressing issues within health, education and local government than some of his proposed manifesto pledges. Labour, fairly or not, has an image of ‘too much spending’, which is addressed in the leaked manifesto - a ‘fiscal credibility rule’ - does he choose to stick his ‘costed’ policies or re-prioritise to ‘make good’ the basics that have been ignored by austerity?Clearly we don’t have the detail on the draft manifesto pledges - for most of those pledges, the detail is the difference between a good idea and a bad one.I very much like the following ( - with added comment)Extend the Freedom of Information Act to private companies running public services. We do not have functional markets for private providers of public services or public providers of public services. In the NHS, competition does not drive quality as there is no competition - high quality services cannot expand to meet increased demand at the expense of poor services. We also do not seem to be able to write a private provider contract in the taxpayers interest. I recognise the difficulty with information, but I think it would be better to contract on the basis that all information pertaining to, say, an NHS patient who’s had a scan performed by a private provider, also belongs to the NHS. Private providers should be obliged to provide all the metrics - waiting times, staffing levels etc.. - that the public sector has to provide.Lower the voting age to 16. Yes, please. No brainer. Taxation without representation is outrageous.Make more funds available for childcare and social care. Two words: Sure Start. Disadvantaged children do not exist in a bubble waiting to be saved at 5, 11, 16 and 18, they have to get to those ages fully able to to take advantage of educational opportunities. It is absurd to cut inheritance tax whilst social care is so lacking, though I sympathise with the idea that people want to pass on assets/money to their families. Inheritance is not something most people have to worry about and should not be preserved at the highest possible level at the expense of actually providing health and social care to the older generation. They retired thinking they had provided for themselves via NI all their working lives: they cannot privately insure themselves now and they could not have known that future Governments would prefer low tax over meeting those commitments. Much of the pressure on the NHS is due to lack of care - constant attendance for water infections, falls etc.. - and high thresholds for NHS treatments, meaning they become much more unwell before anything is done.Review universal credit cuts with a view to reversing them. I honestly think that the behaviour of the DWP since, at least, 2010 needs criminal investigation. Not a public inquiry, unless they can be made quicker and more meaningful, and with the obligation to do something about the findings. People ought to know whether or not they will receive social security/disability benefits: none of us can be sure that, should we become too ill to work, we will ‘qualify’ and, if we are too ill to work, there is little we can do to get by financially. The social security system is in a giant mess and I don’t figure it’s possible to ascertain the giant mess it is in.Extend the right to abortion to Northern Ireland. Yes.Respect the Brexit referendum result and give a meaningful vote on any deal to parliament. EU citizens living in the UK would have their rights guaranteed unilaterally. Theresa May’s Brexit white paper would be replaced with a plan that aims to retain the benefits of the customs union and single market. This makes me cross as Labour gave away any requirement for Brexit to be a function of parliament. Mr Corbyn is effectively saying that his Brexit requires parliamentary scrutiny, but Theresa May’s does not. Go figure. Happy to see the guarantee of rights for UK EU citizens.Recognise the benefit that immigrants have brought but introduce fair rules and reasonable management, working with employers that need to recruit from abroad but deterring exploitation. This is too vague at this draft stage. I think it’s important to get across the message that pressure on housing, schools and the NHS is a function of not spending part of the money brought in by immigrants on expanding public services, even though there would still be a net profit from their contribution to the Exchequer. This has been central Government failure.I might like the followingMake zero-hours contracts illegal. I think we need to have secure employment with secure hours and regular, predictable income, but recognise that for some zero-hours contracts are advantageous for both employer and employee. Is there a way for an employee to request zero-hours whilst ensuring they are not pressured to do so?Build 100,000 new council houses per year. We have a lack of secure housing for lower income families and this has led to families moving from private rental to private rental, which if there are children is a problem for continuity of education and community. I think council houses provide a good driver for affordable rents in the private sector too. I would think differently about this if there was a ‘right to buy’ without replacement of housing stock.Complete HS2 from London to Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Scotland. I don’t know how the cost of this stacks up against other needs. There are lots of other needs.Bring parts of the energy industry into public ownership and introduce a local, socially owned energy firm in every area. Also introduce an “immediate emergency price cap” to make sure dual fuel bills stay below £1,000 a year. Messing with markets requires the market to be functional and I tend to agree with Martin Lewis - here is his reaction to price capping from the Conservatives Conservatives promise cap on energy prices .Nationalise the railways. I don’t know to be honest. I suspect there are more important priorities for now.Phase out tuition fees. Ideal world, yes. And maintenance grants and the ability of every 18 year old to be financially independent. Personally, I thought Nick Clegg was right to choose raising the tax threshold over tuition fees - if I had to pick one it’s the one I would have chosen.Insulate homes of disabled veterans for free. Yes, but they may have more pressing needs. Maybe go ask them.Employ 1,000 more border guards. Copy and paste that over every single bit of the public sector: prison officers, nurses, social workers and so on.Retain the Trident nuclear deterrent. A sentence from earlier drafts saying that a prime minister should be “extremely cautious” about using a weapon that would kill “millions of innocent civilians” has been removed. I would have liked more thought on nuclear alternatives to Trident, but as we are now, there is only the Trident option.Place “peace, universal rights and international law” at the heart of foreign policy, while committing to spend 2% of GDP on defence, as required by Nato. Yes, we should meet our NATO obligations. More specifics on “peace, universal rights and international law” would be good: it doesn’t say much on its own apart from well, yes, those things are good. I’d like to think we do that now.I don’t like the followingOppose a second Scottish referendum. Labour can oppose it, but they have no right to deny it.Missing from this is the massive electoral reform I think we need. Electoral campaigns need more stringent legislation around them in the interests of the electorate. I also think we need reform of the way Government collects data on its own performance: it is not in the public interest to continue as we are.Thanks for the A2A