Good to go. Right, that's us. We're happy we're recording.

Despite John Campbell mischievously suggesting in the last redlines, he thought we'd cease to be or become an ex-podcast.

We are back, as is he, and very welcome he is too, sitting alongside Mark Devonport and the Irish News columnist Mary Kelly.

A lot of water has passed under the proverbial Storm and Bridge since this time last week.

So we're going to talk about spads, pay rises and maybe even administrative reform. But first, it has to be about the money. And John has to be said, you sounded a bit exasperated on good morning this morning. You did, you did. Trying to explain the options for revenue raising because people toss these ideas out and then when you actually

do the sums doesn't always add up yeah so you know clearly people want to kind of get their

ideas out there about you know ways in which storm can be put on a sounder financial footing but

there aren't that many easy options really um you know for example one thing which gets suggested

is um could we start to impose charges for prescriptions again?

Because in England, people pay £9 per item, but there's a whole range of exemptions around that.

So pregnant women, people on low incomes, some pensioners, people with various medical conditions,

they don't pay for their prescriptions.

So we would have a similar

system here and what would happen is that about 70, 80% of prescriptions would remain exempt.

And then on top of that, you have to have some sort of administrative system to decide who pays

and who doesn't. So the amount of money that you would probably actually save by making everybody

pay for prescriptions would be vanishingly small.

So a figure of 13 million at one stage not so very long ago is the amount of money that you'd

actually be up if you started charging for prescriptions, again, would be about £13 million,

which is the proverbial drop in the ocean.

Yeah, so, and if you think Department of Health, its annual budget is now ticking on for

$6 billion, so $6,000 million a year, that is in the scheme of things.

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