How can hospitals be allowed to rate the quality of their own food:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/hospitals-own-food-top-marks-231337423.html#mQlUSzB

How stupid: of course anybody being allowed to rate themselves highly will do so especially when they have a public image to maintain. I’ve seen the sorry state of hospital food on television documentaries and from working in care myself; and being subjected to that is the absolute last thing that will do any good and the last thing I would want.

Good food is a necessity to good health, which means nutritious food, not whatever can be crammed into microwavable packaging at the lowest cost. Considering the effect of food on mental health and the psychological aspect of immunity and recovery a need for good food becomes apparent.

Patients should therefore most definitely have the same right to good food as ‘government ministers, school kids and prisoners’ as the Campaign for better Hospital Food are putting it.

That being said let’s examine hospital funding and see how they make their money:

NHS rents rather than buys hospitals so as a result private companies which own our NHS hospitals can;

·         Charge for television privileges (£10 per day)

·         Only WH Smith stores not to sell books (I can only assume to pressure longer staying patients into purchasing telly privileges or magazine after magazine)

·         Car parking fees for people driving themselves in, visitors and staff

·         Only afford to bulk buy microwave meals rather than cook high quality and tasty food.

I can fully sympathise with people thinking the NHS is losing its perspective, especially when people are at times so bored if they cannot afford to pay for entertainment that they go out of there mind. I had a mate tell me about a 3 day stint in hospital and he saw on the other side of the ward someone who looked like he had been in for days: he looked like he was going out of his mind: well who can afford £70 a week just to watch telly?

People say you can’t put a price on happiness, well apparently you can; our NHS may be free at point of entry but the fee’s start going up as soon as that point is passed if you actually want the stay in hospital to be a comfortable experience.

It's the economy stupid: why capitalism is reliant on a high minimum wage

You know I think it’s absolutely stupid claiming that increasing the minimum wage would increase unemployment: Which western nation managed to cope with the global recession the best? Australia; and what is the national minimum wage in Australia? AU$16 per hour or AU$20 for casual staff. When translated into British currency that equals £9.42 per hour for contracted staff and £11.79 for those of us on those highly exploitative Zero-hour contracts, quite an increase on the £6.19 we get over here in Blighty.

For American readers; there is only about a 10-12% difference between the Australian and American dollar so after doing a currency conversion check: if you American readers were living in Oz you’d have the equivalent of a $14.59 minimum wage if you had contracted hours or $18.25 if you’re a casual worker.

Poverty makes a recession worse because in a capitalist system there is a reliance on spending power to improve the economy, if people don’t have spending power then the economy can’t grow. So if an economy exists where poor people are allowed to exist it will always have a fragile economy, subject to crashes and recessions. This means that the rich need to learn that economic stability is reliant on money exchanging hands – not being horded in a bank account that is full beyond any possibility of it ever being needed, yes people should have a reserve and money for retirement, but not to excess.

All that does is take large amounts of money out of circulation, which means it’s not actively being used to support the capitalist system. This means that there needs to be a fundamental change in the way we view money: we need to look at money as resource first and not as private property. Don’t get me wrong people who work hard should be rewarded for it. But that should mean that NOBODY who works for a living is living in poverty. It means that keeping excess money once you’ve got it should be just as hard as earning it in the first place.

I think we’ve all heard the phrase that money is the root of all evil, well thanks to capitalism it’s the lifeblood of western if not global civilisation: and who ever heard of someone being able to buy and hoard dozens of times more blood than they could ever need from a blood bank and keep frozen somewhere ‘just in case’ while clinic operations ground to a halt: well that is what is being done with low minimum wages and excessive wealth in the hands of the top 1%, because people are suffering a level of poverty in the west not known for decades, and there are people going hungry while a very small minority receive each year more than some earn in a lifetime.