Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

These will all almost certainly be making their way into food post-Brexit in the UK.

As I understand it the reasons for potassium bromate being legal in the US are more to do with the idiosyncratic way the FDA treated things already in common use when it became responsible for regulating food carcinogens. So even a freewheeling Brexit means Brexit UK regulator is unlikely to approve this _today_; if potassium bromate were a novel ingredient today the FDA probably wouldn’t approve it either.

But the reason to be worried about UK standards is because the government may want food regulations to be as similar to US regulations as possible, to make it easier/cheaper for American food to be imported here. So the fact that the FDA wouldn't approve it if it were novel today doesn't necessarily mean the UK won't approve it purely because it's already approved in the US.

Aligning UK food standards with US ones would be extremely difficult, expensive, and unpopular, and would shut down most of the UK's remaining food trade with the EU and other places which align to EU standards. And potassium bromate would be the least of their worries...

In 2017, the UK had 5 times more trade with the EU than the US. I don‘t think they will jeopardize that in favor of a much smaller trading partner.

That’s literally what successive UK governments have been saying for the past 6+ years.

There is literally a bill about to be passed by the government whose only purpose is to destroy all laws aligning the UK with the EU that would prevent trade with the EU for the purported purpose of being able to trade with non-EU countries.

Is this the Retained EU Law Bill? Looks like there's still a few more steps before its given royal ascent https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3340

oh yeah grandfather knew BESSSST

Don't worry, our highly efficient, world class, over-provisioned National Health Service will deal with the consequences in short order.

The NHS that totally received the £350 million per week that the UK no longer has to pay to the EU

Well it did, as part of normal health inflation requirements.

The UK spends far less per head on healthcare than almost any other western country, as an absolute amount and as a portion of GDP.

> The UK spends far less per head on healthcare than almost any other western country, as an absolute amount and as a portion of GDP.

this is false, but i keep seeing it repeated everywhere.

as a portion of GDP the UK is the 4th from the top:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268826/health-expenditur...

per capita the UK spends more than NZ, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc:

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/154e8143-en/index.html?i...

looking at 2019 - the year before covid blew everything out of the water and it's unclear how care has been apportioned, other western European countries spending more as a portion of GDP

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA

Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark all spend more (as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Austrailia)

Eastern and Southern European countries have very different demographics, income levels, and from personal experience expectations -- certainly Greek healthcare is very different to what you get in countries like France, UK and US.

> looking at 2019

this is cherry picking a bit as the UK has been consistently in the top 20 countries in the world for health as a portion of GDP.

and this percentage of gdp spent on health has been going up for 40 years now:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/317708/healthcare-expend...

How does it then manage to be lower in the quality of care than all of those then?

> How does it then manage to be lower in the quality of care than all of those then?

it's not. the current issues are due to the covid backlogs and are present all over europe, including france, germany etc

https://www.statista.com/statistics/888735/quality-of-access...

It doesn't, although there's a large number of high income people repeating this youtube nonsense

> It doesn't

All the published comparisons disagree with this.

Do you have a non-youtube source? The only place I found which said UK had a better healthcare was "investopedia"… and their criteria didn't seem to have anything to do with the health of the patients.

Because it's run by the government?

Those other countries' healthcare is also ran by the government… so cut it out with your invisible hand dreams.

Literally the first one I checked:

"The healthcare system of New Zealand has undergone significant changes throughout the past several decades. From an essentially fully public system based on the Social Security Act 1938, reforms have introduced market and health insurance elements primarily since the 1980s, creating a mixed public-private system for delivering healthcare."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_New_Zealand

I don't see what this has to do here, since the other comment was comparing to Portugal, Spain, France and the likes.

In any case, usually when you start making it private it gets better for a little while, to convince people to move over, and the government to defund the public one.

Then when the competition from the state is over they can start reaping the profits (like in USA).

citation needed, United Kingdom seems middling at most and NL, DK, AU, NZ and FI all spend less. [1]

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...

OECD stats. In 2019 (so before covid costs), as % of GDP.

AU - 10.23

NL -10.14

DK - 10.121

UK - 9.875

FI - 9.172

NZ - 9.049

(Also France, Germany, US, Sweden, Canada, Belgium, Austria etc all higher)

Nothing to worry, they are not in the EU anymore...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com