Pensions, Retirement and Old Age

Age Canada Old Pension

Private Healthcare: Leeches on the NHS

Gordon Brown has renamed the DTI the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) to reflect its focus on the reduction of red tape and a commitment to entrepreneurship. 2006 Older employees plan to keep on working Older employees are increasingly willing to work on past the traditional retirement age, according to a new survey. called 'baby boomers' have told Heydey, profit organisation set up by Age Concern, they want to work past the state pension age.

Funds Pension News Article by Kevin Devine, February 2005

The findings come in the wake of the furore surrounding Lord Turner' age by 2050. Providing an example for people embarking on setting up a business, SME owners and managers are increasingly finding ways to fund their retirement, including property investment and investing in private pensions, reports smallbusiness.co.uk. Although SME owners and managers are understandable passionate about their businesses' success, David Robertson, chief executive officer at BFS advised that they " earned break".

Hancock John Pension The government's plans for 'independent treatment centres' (ITCs) - privately run units that carry out routine hip, knee and cataract operations for the NHS - have run into trouble.

"Requiring compulsory contributions from businesses will hit small firms disproportionately and will be seen as another tax on them." Lord Turner led a commission on pensions for the government which published its findings last November, calling for the retirement age to be raised from 65 to 69. The report also called for the establishment of a national pensions savings scheme, a proposal which the FTSE Group today claimed could produce "massive distortions" in the FTSE 100 index.

Pension Widow Under the plans, NHS trusts pay private companies to carry out these operations, often referred to as 'elective surgery' because patients decide whether or not to go ahead with the treatment. Health secretary John Reid has touted the idea as a way of reducing NHS waiting lists. But the bullying way in which the Department of Health is pushing the policy through has provoked a backlash of criticism from the NHS managers who are expected to implement it. And worse still for the government, the row has exposed the real agenda behind their plans.

Fund Pension

by Voanews President Bush has defended his new proposal to cut some retirement benefits as part of his reform of the U.S. pension program, Social Security. If you would like to receive late breaking news on issues covered by AXcess News then you need to subscribe.Print This Page April 30, 2005 (AXcess News) President Bush has defended his new proposal to cut some retirement benefits as part of his reform of the U.S. pension program, Social Security.

Investment Pension The government has set a target of 15 percent of the elective operations currently carried out by the NHS to be performed instead by the private sector, with this target to be reached by 2008. Evidence is emerging that ITCs have been given guaranteed volumes of work to ensure that this target is achieved. And as activity is transferred to the private sector, NHS services are being put at risk. Many of the contracts with the private-sector providers are on a 'take or pay' basis. This means that if an NHS trust fails to take up a place in an ITC it still has to pay for the slot. In other words, if a patient opts to be treated by the NHS (as provided for under the new 'patient choice' scheme), the private company still gets paid for the operation. This is destabilising NHS trusts' finances.

Canadian Pension Plan

Department Pension Work On top of this, in many areas, the guarantees given to ITCs far exceed existing demand for such operations. This means that patients are taken away from the NHS, leaving the trusts affected to bear the higher costs involved. This is what lies behind recent newspaper coverage of locked wards in NHS hospitals, as patients are transferred to the private sector.

Ibm Pension

Benefit Corporation Guaranty As if this wasn't bad enough, many NHS trusts are already experiencing financial problems, in part because of the government's new financing arrangements for the NHS. Under these arrangements, known as 'payment by results', hospitals receive a set amount of funding for every patient they treat. This means that, instead of following broad NHS-level agreements for the numbers of patients treated, hospitals are in effect competing with each other for patients, and therefore funding. The new system has contributed to deficits at a large number of trusts.

Calculator Pension

Government Pension The privatisation plans, combined with financing arrangements that increase competition between different parts of the health service, are clearly a disaster for the NHS. Far from being about filling gaps in NHS capacity as the government would have us believe, the ITC scheme is really aimed at taking work away from the NHS and boosting the private sector at its expense. And it exposes the reality behind the government's rhetoric about 'patient choice'. Far from increasing public control over the health service, ITCs are a scheme for handing over billions of pounds of public funds to private business interests.

Pension Prague

Pension Retirement But the row over ITCs shows that the government may be over-reaching themselves. A fightback over pensions - in the NHS and across the public sector - can knock them further off course, and has the potential to feed into a fightback over privatisation itself.

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