Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "GBNews"
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The reason the disabled are scepticalis because we have seen it before and it always goes the same way.
They start of declaring a war on fraud and benefits scroungers, when the combined fraud and error overpayment is only a couple of percent (currently 3.6% combined).
They then do nothing to identify the 1.8% of fraud and error underpayment, or the 3.6% overpayment, and instead just start looking for excuses to slash the benefits budget, resulting in lots of people who need help getting thrown under the bus.
Then because these people who genuinely need help end up struggling, they either get forced into illegality, or end up getting mental health problems.
Because of the increase in these problems, and in the scandals comming out about stopping benefits for people in genuine need, they have to try and patch up the system, but because they never have joined up thinking just make the problems worse.
Finally they end up having to move back towards something similar to what that had before, but vastly inferior, causing more distress and suffering.
Then they wait a couple of decades and start it all over again.
You already have quaraplegics.being thrown of benefits because they don't need any help, and double amputees being told they don't have any problem walking, even while they are on the waiting list for some legs. And it will get worse before it gets better.
You do not fix a system with problems due to error by adding extra causes of error on top of them. You fix them by identifying the causes of the errors, engineering improvements to the system to spot the errors early not punishing people for genuine errors, and only then do you use the information gathered during this process to improve the process to catch fraud earlier.
Adding people with lower levels of training to override health care specialists does not stop the people being ill.
Also this country does suck at retraining the unemployed.
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There are a lot of unrelated issues being mixed up in this thread, some of which have simple but politically unpopular, some of which are complex but the politicians want simplistic solutions, which don't work.
First is migration. You can solve this in an easy but unpopular way, just let everyone into the country, except those on criminal databases shared with other countries. At that point you have got rid of all of the visa beaurocracy and dealt with most of the illegals, who will now be legal. Totally unpopular, but proven to work as part of a broader system.
Then you have legal migrants, of which you have many more. If they want come for a holiday for six months or a year and can afford it, they can already do that now. You just make them give details of their country of origin when entering the country, and bounce them if they cannot, just as you do now.
At this point you have a database of every legal migrant in the country, and where they came from. If they commit crimes, and get convicted, they get deported, the same as now, but easier, as you know where they came from.
This deals with the foreign crooks. At this point your database has a list of foreign nationals in good standing, and they can start earning entitlements. You start with emergency care, for all people in the country, which gets rid of the need to ask silly questions about their insurance status while you are trying to save their life. It doesn't work anyway.
If they are just being tourists, they pay vat, tax on fuel either for a hire car, or indirectly through the use of taxis, and other services, so they are contributing.
If they decide they want to work in the service industry for extra spending money to help pay for luxuries, let them, but force their boss to register them for a national insurance number, and let them have one. They will start on the emergency rate, which is high, and gradually migrate to a rate correct for the work they are doing, and in the meantime can be getting national insurance contributions to entitle them for gp care.
Their contributions can be used to decide which services they can get free, and which they need to pay for, and can go towards their right to become a citizen. After ten years of work, you should have built up enough good standing that you can just become a citizen by passing the language requirements and a few other necessary things.
At this point you have converted all the migrants both legal and illegal into productive members of the community and deported the crooks who got caught, and most crooks get caught eventually.
As for people already living here, you can give them points for spending years here as a child which will then entitle them to services. If you make it clear in their national insurance communications that they are on a tempory foreign national insurance number and let them apply to convert to citizenship at any time after they have built up enough points, you automatically eliminate scandals like the windrush deportations where they just did not know they were not citizens.
If you are foreign and become out of work, and do not have enough points, you have to go home,nand in the mean time you can deduct money from their emergency national insurance contributions to build up a bond to pay for them to get sent home even if they run out of money. If they go home by themselves, it reverts to a fund to top up the bonds of those who have not yet been here long enough. This also means that crooks with a job end up paying for their own deportation.
As to health tourists, you can get them to go home as soon as they are well enough to travel. At this point, no illegals, any illegals are crooks by definition, but can convert to residents in good standing simply by getting a job, and can become a citizen simply by having a job for long enough.
You can deal with foreign wives by changing national insurance from the employee, to the couple, and both partners contributions pay for both partners entitlements. This also fixes the problem of the high paid husbands divorcing the wives near retirement and leaving the wife with no entitlements.
Now you get to those people who become ill. Let doctors make the decsions, as they have to in order to provide treatment, but deal with it differently.
At the moment, if i come down with something which affects my ability to drive, the doctor has to notify the dvla, who then make a choice based upon the real data. Just extend it to cover conditions which affect your ability to work and notify the dwp. This gets rid of firms like atos milking the system so the government can punish the ill.
You can then implement a system like working tax credit, but done properly, where you get the points as your circumstances change, and then they pay you the right amount. This gets rid of the 1.8% of underpayments due to fraud and error. It also can get rid of overpayments if you require the person on benefit to notify of a change in curcumstance like you have to with most benefits now.
The overpayments are at 3.6%, due to fraud and error, and as you have half that amount gettting underpayed, you can assume that have of the over payment is due to error, as most poeple will not commit fraud to get less money. At this point you are getting most of your benefits without means testing, which is provably a lot cheaper.
At this point you have implemented universal basic income, as a side effect of dealing with the mess that migration and benefits is currently in, and it is affordable, as you can make it taxable like basic state pension and child benefit, and just adjust the allowances to make it revenue neutral, just like was the case with working tax credit.
By this point, people accrue entitlements by working or being in education, married couples end up with fair contributions to their pensions, sickness benefits are decided fairly by medical need and awarded automatically, and you have entitlements accruing gradually based on contributions.
Of course you do have to fund health care properly, so that people get treated in a timely fashion and don't just keep getting sicker, and you have to fund reeducation for meaningfull local skills shortages for the unemployed and those being released from prison, but the whole thing will work better then the current system, without the stigma,mand mostly for less money.
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