UK: Britons now have the worst access to healthcare in Europe, and it shows

Britons now have the worst access to healthcare in Europe, and it shows

"For the past few months, a fierce debate has been raging over the question of what exactly is behind the sudden, sharp exodus of older British workers into economic inactivity. Is it driven by rapidly worsening health or, more benignly, a flow of early retirements? There are two further, key questions here.

First, where does one draw the line in determining whether ill health played a role in someone’s decision to leave the labour force? And second, is it preferable to have a trend of worsening health that drives people out of the workforce, or one that spares the working but condemns the already workless to stay put?

One thing, though, is clear: the UK is now roughly three years into a steady march of chronic illness that is scything through the most vulnerable and marginalised in our population.

Beginning shortly before the pandemic but then accelerating, there has been a steep climb in rates of chronic ill health among the long-term workless. Today there are half a million more working-age people in the UK with impairing health conditions than if pre-pandemic trends had continued, and 90 per cent of them are people who have not worked in several years."

More at link - access numbers may be limited.

 

@CRG you made the point in your excellent disquisition elsewhere on attitudes to work and illness under New Labour that their predecessors had exploited sickness stats to massage unemployment figures.

With a 100-year recession about to hit, but sovereignty-related labour shortages the issue rather than unemployment - at least for the moment - the difficulty is going to be spotting where and why spin is applied, at least in anything published by the DWP.

It’s also odd to be reading the FTs analysis while struggling personally with the issue of whether to stop working.

 

If you want to spot spin its right there in front of us.

The phrasing of that FT treatment is biased in that it creates an ambiguity which leaves open the interpretation that being out of work makes you ill.

Surely another way of phrasing that would be - people who are suffering the most have been out of work longest - ?

Well duh!

What I fear is that governmental approaches might take the view that they can justify forcing people who are ill to work on the grounds it might be good for them. Even though the evidence for the horrendous affects of long covid is piling up judging by tweets below that one.

This Orwellian nightmare of denial and doublethink is not a stretch for PWME as it is basically what we have been subjected to for fifty years.

Yes we do have to watch the spin emanating from the DWP.

 

The latter, naturally. I don’t think the former would be technically possible without a very carefully calibrated sequence of disasters. Even after an asteroid hit, we’d be officially back in growth once survivors started swapping seashells for edible roots.

It’s not an unusual usage when describing events of varying likelihood.

 

Notice the phrasing in the tweet...

"Chronic illness soaring in uk working age population, with people who have been out of work for years suffering the most" (my bolding)

notice the subtle manipulation.

Lets reword it to better reflect reality

"Chronic illness soaring in uk working age population... with people who suffer most having been out of work for several years.

Having chronic illness makes one unable to work. Being out of work doesnt give one chronic illness, i mean of course it doesnt help. But this is again part of the manipulation to imply that we are ill because we're not working.... so if they can bully us into work we'll get better. If only it were so