Doctors' strike 'will be very unpopular' (From Lancashire Telegraph)

it takes that long to see a doctor i cant see it making alot of differance

Of course it's unpopular. Doctors, already on an average wage above £100k, want equally high gold plated pensions, and they don't care if already struggling families, who can only dream of even an OK pension themselves, have to pay for it. They'll even make those hard working people suffer by striking to try and blackmail their way.

It's grossly unfair.

Surely doctors should be protesting about the 6,500 pension holders on a whopping £50k pension in the NHS who aren't even doctors or nurses. Do doctors think that the hard working and struggling families should pay for those obscene NHS pensions as well.

Address all the fat cats in the public sector first, then the public will sympathise with you. Currently all these strikes are protecting the fat cats first and foremost.

Doctors don't get their pensions for free but pay in above average contributions and receive a pension related to their final salary like many in the public service and a few in private service. They get relatively large pensions because they have relatively large salaries. Now before everybody descends into pangs of jealousy the question must be asked why so many private final pension schemes have been closed and the reason in many cases is that they have been mismanaged and/or not enough has been put in by both employers and/or employees. Doctors will be required to pay in 14% of their salaries to their pension pot.
Remember, the real the real need is for all to have a decent pension scheme not fits of jealousy as those in power and in the right wing press would like to divert attention away from the real problem. And I have no connection with the health service.

Noiticer wrote:
Doctors don't get their pensions for free but pay in above average contributions and receive a pension related to their final salary like many in the public service and a few in private service. They get relatively large pensions because they have relatively large salaries. Now before everybody descends into pangs of jealousy the question must be asked why so many private final pension schemes have been closed and the reason in many cases is that they have been mismanaged and/or not enough has been put in by both employers and/or employees. Doctors will be required to pay in 14% of their salaries to their pension pot.
Remember, the real the real need is for all to have a decent pension scheme not fits of jealousy as those in power and in the right wing press would like to divert attention away from the real problem. And I have no connection with the health service.

Brilliant, if that's the case then doctor's pensions should be completely removed from any public liability. Doctors pay in loads of money, so they'll have loads of money at the end. It's the perfect solution. If what you say is true then why isn't that happening? Why aren't doctor's campaigning for that?

They aren't campaigning for that because it's complete lies to say that doctors contributions get anywhere near paying their outrageously amazing pension.

Final salary pensions are being closed in the private sector because they are totally unsustainable. There are very few final schemes left anywhere in the private sector. Pretty much zero to new pension holders.

When I started my first pension with a large firm nearly twenty years ago, it had already become contributions not final salary. Contributions are the only pensions living in the real world. Final salary rely on other mugs paying for it. They are obviously rife in the public sector, because the general public are the mugs paying other people's pensions.

The real problem is pensions, make no mistake. The problems in the eurozone aren't the banks, they are country's taking out too much debt. Just like other country's, we are currently, even after the cuts, mortgaging our children's future to pay for these pensions. And keeping them as they are, with more people joining to milk that deficit cow, is sustainable exactly how?

Public sector pensions are such a huge black hole and a liability for normal people in the street, who don't want them anyway. Why should anyone pay for anyone else's pension when they are struggling themselves?

Doctors actually probably need to pay about 50% contributions, at least, for the pension they actually receive. Mentioning that they will only be required to pay 14% therefore is a joke. What are they paying now? Are they so selfish that they are willing to blackmail and make the general public suffer because they want to continue paying nothing for an outrageous, totally unrealistic, pension that some other poor sap has to pay, even after the changes?

How unbelievably selfish. They must look down at the general public who are suffering, and have to pay this ridiculous money, as dirt on their shoes. Otherwise why don't they care about making them suffer, when it sounds like they are getting an amazing deal, i.e. completely unfair to the poor saps who have to pay, after the proposed changes anyway?

Well said, Jack.

I'd be chuffed if I could get a job that paid as much as doctors pay in pension contributions.

Jack Herer wrote:
Of course it's unpopular. Doctors, already on an average wage above £100k, want equally high gold plated pensions, and they don't care if already struggling families, who can only dream of even an OK pension themselves, have to pay for it. They'll even make those hard working people suffer by striking to try and blackmail their way.

It's grossly unfair.

Surely doctors should be protesting about the 6,500 pension holders on a whopping £50k pension in the NHS who aren't even doctors or nurses. Do doctors think that the hard working and struggling families should pay for those obscene NHS pensions as well.

Address all the fat cats in the public sector first, then the public will sympathise with you. Currently all these strikes are protecting the fat cats first and foremost.

thats it jack race to the bottom. PRAT

everywhere is sh1t wrote:
it takes that long to see a doctor i cant see it making alot of differance

beat me to it

2 for 5p wrote:

Jack Herer wrote:
Of course it's unpopular. Doctors, already on an average wage above £100k, want equally high gold plated pensions, and they don't care if already struggling families, who can only dream of even an OK pension themselves, have to pay for it. They'll even make those hard working people suffer by striking to try and blackmail their way.

It's grossly unfair.

Surely doctors should be protesting about the 6,500 pension holders on a whopping £50k pension in the NHS who aren't even doctors or nurses. Do doctors think that the hard working and struggling families should pay for those obscene NHS pensions as well.

Address all the fat cats in the public sector first, then the public will sympathise with you. Currently all these strikes are protecting the fat cats first and foremost.

thats it jack race to the bottom. PRAT

Is that the catch phrase from your union leaders perchance? I've heard "it shouldn't be a race to the bottom" a few times now so I'm guessing so.

It's not about a race to the "bottom". That "bottom" just happens to be the real world where everyone else has to live. Why should there be some gold plated elite who don't have to live in the real world like the rest of us have to, and who selfishly strike if anyone tries to change this unfair system in any way?

If there is a top and a bottom, those in the public sector, milking the public dry with their pensions, are currently at the top. And those in the private sector, struggling, but having to pay someone else's pension, are at the bottom. If it isn't going to be a race to the bottom in this system, then who is going to pay all the millions and millions of people's pensions in the private sector, who are currently paying for someone else's?

There aren't enough mugs in the country to pay for everyone's pensions. All the people in the public sector are taking up all the slack from the millions of mugs in the private sector already. It can't be a race to the top because there are no more mugs. Besides though, it isn't a race to the bottom, it's a race to the real world.

And it isn't a "race" either with it happening over years with all these selfish strikes, it's a slow dragging of a spoilt child digging their heals in as stamp their feet and scream.

We don't want a race to the bottom. We don't want a top and a bottom. We want fairness so there is no top and bottom. That can only happen with those in the public sector living in the real world, like the rest of us have to.

Doctors pill pushers for the mega rich Chemical consortiums

And all those concerned about paying public service pensions must also be concerned about paying excessively for the goods and services they buy to fuel excessive company profits, directors' excessive salaries and pensions, shareholders' dividends etc. It's not a one sided argument. And remember that doctors miss nine years earning potential from 16 to 23 years of age, will now owe £45 000 in Stuent Loans and earn nothing like £100K for many years. Junior doctors earn £25 000 for the first two years.

happycyclist wrote:
I'd be chuffed if I could get a job that paid as much as doctors pay in pension contributions.

Easy, if you have 4 good A levels and have at least £50,000 to pay yourself through 5 years of medical school then for at least another 5 years you can earn between £25,000 and £35,000. Whilst continuing to study very hard. Where the average of £100,000 comes from I will never know. You are being fed a lot of propaganda by politicians ( like the one who wrote the original article)
PS you will never earn as much as a politician or banker. Remember that Doctors and other public service workers are taxpayers too!

The NHS pension scheme is in surplus over the last 17 years to the tune of over £11 billion pounds.

http://www.nhsbsa.nh
s.uk/Pensions/Docume
nts/Pensions_FOI_Req
uests/Sinar_figures.
pdf

That is enough to pay for the pensions of the largest employer in Europe for about a year and a Half without any additional receipts(that is the NHS by the way).

The NHS pension scheme has the lowest public sector employer contribution (14%) which is capped and it has the highest employee contributions which are equitably distributed so that the better paid subsidise the less well paid. After the 2008 agreement it already satisfied or exceeded all the requirements of the Hutton report for sustainable pensions(CARE state pension age, etc).

The government gets to borrow money on that surplus at no cost to the tax-payer.

Why then do NHS employees need to pay more?

-"The ‘Fair Deal’ policy requires private and voluntary sector employers to provide comparable pensions when they take on public sector workforces. Smaller private and voluntary sector
employers are often unwilling to take on such risks. Labour market flexibility could also be undermined by final salary pension schemes, since they create strong barriers to mobility from the public to the private sector."
Hutton report 2011

Hutton clearly sets out to reduce the NHS pension to that which is available in the private sector when the NHS gets privatised.

And the surplus?
Stolen? Spent on Trident? .......?

capri1 wrote:

happycyclist wrote:
I'd be chuffed if I could get a job that paid as much as doctors pay in pension contributions.

Easy, if you have 4 good A levels and have at least £50,000 to pay yourself through 5 years of medical school then for at least another 5 years you can earn between £25,000 and £35,000. Whilst continuing to study very hard. Where the average of £100,000 comes from I will never know. You are being fed a lot of propaganda by politicians ( like the one who wrote the original article)
PS you will never earn as much as a politician or banker. Remember that Doctors and other public service workers are taxpayers too!

Last year, in an article in the Guardian, GPs average salary was quoted at being just below £110,000 a year.

http://www.guardian.
co.uk/money/blog/201
1/may/28/gps-underpa
id

I'm guessing the cuts haven't quite reached them yet so we can say the average is probably £110k by now. Not bad work if you can get it.

The current annual salary for an MP is £65738.

Doctors, quite clearly, will pretty much always earn more than an MP therefore.

It begs the question; where are you getting your info from? Let me guess, your union representative?

As for bankers, the less said about them the better from the public sector workers. You know that quantative easing that keeps going on? Who pays for that? I'll tell you, it's private sector pension holders who are being shafted there in the long run. So like I say, don't mention the bankers, because it's just another thing that we're not in it all together. Private sector workers are getting shafted far more by the bankers than the public sector workers.

It's just something else which is grossly unfair, but the babies who strike don't think about that. They just join in with the bankers sticking their boot into the hard working, struggling, private sector worker.

Noiticer wrote:
And all those concerned about paying public service pensions must also be concerned about paying excessively for the goods and services they buy to fuel excessive company profits, directors' excessive salaries and pensions, shareholders' dividends etc. It's not a one sided argument. And remember that doctors miss nine years earning potential from 16 to 23 years of age, will now owe £45 000 in Stuent Loans and earn nothing like £100K for many years. Junior doctors earn £25 000 for the first two years.

You are not wrong. There is very much an elite at the top of business who act disgustingly. There is absolutely nothing we can do about it and we wish we could.

Two wrongs don't ever make a right though. Why should the hard working private sector worker get shafted twice because they are already being shafted by those at the top of business. Those elite make up about 0.0001% of the private sector, the rest there have it hard. Why is it OK to justify unfair pensions by citing what the despicable business leaders do?

Please tell me how we are supposed to stop them because I'd love to know? We supposedly had a socialist government for the past 13 years but they were the worst of the lot, rewarding recklessness in business with knighthoods, encouraging obscene, lottery style payouts. Fat lot of good Labour are to the hard working man on the street eh!

plastic1 wrote:
The NHS pension scheme is in surplus over the last 17 years to the tune of over £11 billion pounds.

http://www.nhsbsa.nh

s.uk/Pensions/Docume

nts/Pensions_FOI_Req

uests/Sinar_figures.

pdf

That is enough to pay for the pensions of the largest employer in Europe for about a year and a Half without any additional receipts(that is the NHS by the way).

The NHS pension scheme has the lowest public sector employer contribution (14%) which is capped and it has the highest employee contributions which are equitably distributed so that the better paid subsidise the less well paid. After the 2008 agreement it already satisfied or exceeded all the requirements of the Hutton report for sustainable pensions(CARE state pension age, etc).

The government gets to borrow money on that surplus at no cost to the tax-payer.

Why then do NHS employees need to pay more?

-"The ‘Fair Deal’ policy requires private and voluntary sector employers to provide comparable pensions when they take on public sector workforces. Smaller private and voluntary sector
employers are often unwilling to take on such risks. Labour market flexibility could also be undermined by final salary pension schemes, since they create strong barriers to mobility from the public to the private sector."
Hutton report 2011

Hutton clearly sets out to reduce the NHS pension to that which is available in the private sector when the NHS gets privatised.

And the surplus?
Stolen? Spent on Trident? .......?

Like I say, you need to campaign to have NHS pensions detached from public liability then, as it sounds like their healthy pension pot is currently suffering by being attached. It's the perfect solution with this "surplus". Why aren't you campaigning for that to happen?

Final salary pensions have nothing to do with labour market flexibility and everything to do with sustainability. It's no good adding your conspiracy theories as to why final salary have stopped in the private sector, if you are missing the obvious answer that the sums simply don't add up.

Final salary pensions pay far more than the person contributes, therefore the money has to come from somewhere. Don't you understand that simple economics? For the public sector, it's the mugs in the private sector who pay that huge shortfall. If that's not the case, then why are they even attached? Companies simply can't afford to pay these never ending pots though, they aren't realistic, there are no mugs to pay them forever.

You clearly need to just understand that very basic fact, rather than quoting silly things like labour market flexibility.

You are right Jack Doctors shouldn't be a burden on the public taxes and should withdraw from the NHS. Everyone would be better off. I have private insurance and I find it much better then the NHS which I have occasionally had to use. People pay for pet insurance, its not that much different to pay for their own. And think of what they could be saving in taxes.

Fact...only Consultants and G.P's earn an average of £100k p/a & the average starting salary for a newly qualified Dr (FY1) is £25,000.

With 5yrs additional studying after A'levels, followed by the many years it takes to progress up the ranks....it's not actually as well paid as other 'elite' professions where the mega bucks can be earned much earlier & serve us much less.

Fire Fly wrote:
Fact...only Consultants and G.P's earn an average of £100k p/a & the average starting salary for a newly qualified Dr (FY1) is £25,000.

With 5yrs additional studying after A'levels, followed by the many years it takes to progress up the ranks....it's not actually as well paid as other 'elite' professions where the mega bucks can be earned much earlier & serve us much less.

So they start at £25k and then it goes up so that in five years it ends up at £100k (which in both cases is probably more like £40k and £150k respectively when pensions are factored in). Sounds amazing.

It just needs to be fair that's all. No one is complaining about the wages, it's the grossly unfair pensions that other mugs have to pay.

Commentator184 wrote:
You are right Jack Doctors shouldn't be a burden on the public taxes and should withdraw from the NHS. Everyone would be better off. I have private insurance and I find it much better then the NHS which I have occasionally had to use. People pay for pet insurance, its not that much different to pay for their own. And think of what they could be saving in taxes.

Your argument speaks volumes. Are these silly worst case scenarios how the strikers' justify their selfish behaviour?

I'm not saying that doctors shouldn't be a burden on public taxes, I'm saying their grossly unfair, completely unsusatinable pensions shouldn't be. The NHS doesn't need to be privitised in any way, if pensions were simply made fair.

I'll give you the real stark choice therefore which should be put to the general public in a referendum. What do the people want;

a) Massively improved and better funded hospitals and care?

Or

b) Grossly unfair and unsustainable pensions to carry on forever, getting more and more expensive to the poor saps in the private sector every year who have to pay them?

Public services could be improved massively if public servants simply lived in the real world like the rest of us have to. If they did that we would never in a million years need privitised health care. How selfish of public servants to deny the public that eh, by clinging to their competely unsustainable pensions.

We need that referendum!

It's as unfair and unjust as everyone else who chooses to strike over something that will change again in another 5 years unless the population decreases dramatically...the govt should have made reasonable changes years ago, not drastic changes now! Those that do have a pension, be lucky, some don't have that anymore...I am the lucky one and there are numerous things out there that we should be striking about..pensions comes way down on that list because if we carry on dishing out money to everyone other than ourselves, paying out money to people who just step off a plane rather than telling them to sod off and the list goes on then we actually wont have any bloody pensions left...the main culprits for this mess...ALL the politicians...no party these days are a worthy cause...they all talk crap!

Jack Herer wrote:

plastic1 wrote:
The NHS pension scheme is in surplus over the last 17 years to the tune of over £11 billion pounds.

http://www.nhsbsa.nh


s.uk/Pensions/Docume


nts/Pensions_FOI_Req


uests/Sinar_figures.


pdf

That is enough to pay for the pensions of the largest employer in Europe for about a year and a Half without any additional receipts(that is the NHS by the way).

The NHS pension scheme has the lowest public sector employer contribution (14%) which is capped and it has the highest employee contributions which are equitably distributed so that the better paid subsidise the less well paid. After the 2008 agreement it already satisfied or exceeded all the requirements of the Hutton report for sustainable pensions(CARE state pension age, etc).

The government gets to borrow money on that surplus at no cost to the tax-payer.

Why then do NHS employees need to pay more?

-"The ‘Fair Deal’ policy requires private and voluntary sector employers to provide comparable pensions when they take on public sector workforces. Smaller private and voluntary sector
employers are often unwilling to take on such risks. Labour market flexibility could also be undermined by final salary pension schemes, since they create strong barriers to mobility from the public to the private sector."
Hutton report 2011

Hutton clearly sets out to reduce the NHS pension to that which is available in the private sector when the NHS gets privatised.

And the surplus?
Stolen? Spent on Trident? .......?

Like I say, you need to campaign to have NHS pensions detached from public liability then, as it sounds like their healthy pension pot is currently suffering by being attached. It's the perfect solution with this "surplus". Why aren't you campaigning for that to happen?

Final salary pensions have nothing to do with labour market flexibility and everything to do with sustainability. It's no good adding your conspiracy theories as to why final salary have stopped in the private sector, if you are missing the obvious answer that the sums simply don't add up.

Final salary pensions pay far more than the person contributes, therefore the money has to come from somewhere. Don't you understand that simple economics? For the public sector, it's the mugs in the private sector who pay that huge shortfall. If that's not the case, then why are they even attached? Companies simply can't afford to pay these never ending pots though, they aren't realistic, there are no mugs to pay them forever.

You clearly need to just understand that very basic fact, rather than quoting silly things like labour market flexibility.

well jack just interested to know what you think of the armed forces pensions. Now that's a gold plated one if I've ever seen one.
But oh no your kind probobly don't mind that.