pumpkinstrokemarrow

No recognition of the fact that we cannot afford for everyone with cancer to have the latest, very expensive drugs. Most people do not have the sort of money involved themselves and it is far from clear that it is appropriate to be spending central funds on such things. Bigger bang for central bucks from other things. And given that I am not in a position to give you this drug and you are not in a position to buy it, what purpose is served by telling you about it? Is it kind to tell someone of a (possibly) magic bullet to which they cannot aspire? How would you feel, wasting slowly and possibly painfully away, if the chap in the next bed was able to flash his plastic and get the magic bullet?

The second piece was about the sad fate of a badly damaged neonate who had been expelled from the intensive care part of the maternity ward, perhaps to die. I forget the details, but I suspect that whoever wrote the piece had never had to do with the children, eventually adults, who survive such a start in life. Many of them never grow up to live normal lives. Some of them are damaged, disturbed and needy for the rest of their lives. Consume hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of care, paid for from central funds. As in the previous case, the impression was of an uncaring NHS, driven by their accountants, with no recognition of either the costs of intensive care or the morality of keeping in life people who were unlikely to have much of one, whatever the expense. I wonder if the Sun did any better in any report it may of made of this incident?

Back at the LRB (bought to while away the journey from Waterloo to Epsom), I read a lament of the impending end of the university as we know it. This doom is, I read, the result of changing from a system whereby universities are largely paid for by a per-capita block grant to a system whereby universities are largely paid for by their customers, these customers getting their money from the government in the form of soft loans. The author also takes a few swipes in passing at the way in which universities are rewarded for bad research rather than for good teaching.

This change in funding is being made in such a way that the amount of money being poured into universities is much reduced, a reduction which will cause much anguish and unpleasantness, particularly in those departments - such as those devoted to the study of Horace and Shakespeare - which are not thought to have much impact on the earning power of UK PLC. Now while I think it quite probable that the relaxed and comfortable ways of universities of my time are no more and that all kinds of good things about universities are no longer thought to be affordable, but what I can't get my head around is why a centrally administered per-capita grant is so different from having students pay the per-capita grant direct, retail as it were. Either way, students can vote with their feet and may well not elect Horace and Shakespeare. Indeed, quite a number of children of people we know have elected media studies or travel & tourism studies - both of which have a bearing on important chunks of our economy. Children who quite possibly would not have gone to university at all in the olden days but done commercial studies at the local tech.. So are we that much worse off? All in all an interesting read this lament, but I do think the author has hung his blame on odd pegs.

Maybe someone out there can explain what he was on?