Via the Rebel, the UK’s National Health Service pulls a Morneau.
The NHS will ban patients from surgery indefinitely unless they lose weight or quit smoking, under controversial plans drawn up in Hertfordshire.
Smokers have long since acquiesced to the heavy hand of “socially conscious” government but it’ll be interesting to see if the “love your body” and “don’t fat-shame me” crowd are also saps.
Are fat smokers that may not love their body as much as say… “I do” .. taxed at the same rate as me?
First they came for…
And if that doesn’t save enough money, they’ll continually define down what constitutes overweight. Because let’s be honest, this is just an attempt to hide the utter failure of their socialized healthcare by – almost literally – using those they’ve declared ‘undesirables’ as human sacrifices.
This is why you don’t let the government run healthcare. (Or anything, if you can help it). Anyone with an IQ above room temperature shouldbe able to make that connection. It’s a shame that the public education system has been transformed into a mill designed with the express purpose of churning out people incapable of making such simple connections.
Governments should not discriminate by keeping people out of a scheme that was created to benefit all. It would make more sense to add to or introduce premiums for higher risk patients. When the political pretense of free delivery is paramount, it reinforces the concept that the state owns the individual by nature of being responsible for their health care costs and therefore can direct how citizens live their lives. Private insurers increase premiums for smokers presumably commensurate with risk. Bottom line: If you expect others to pay for your health care there will be strings attached.
When the vet treats the cow…the OWNER gets the bill.
Problem is, smoking keeps the weight off, so it is a bit of a Catch22. I suspect they know that.
So you can’t have surgery unless you lose weight or quit smoking tobacco, using pot or using illegal drugs or want to change your gender maybe we should keep on going this is fun. How about we just DON’T have a NHS (National Health Service). There has got to be something a lot better out there than this type of service NHS. The Brits better start looking for a individual PRIVATE health care.
“The Brits better start looking for a individual PRIVATE health care.”
Unlike Canada, private medical care is readily available throughout the UK – look up http://www.bupa.co.uk as an example.
The overweight and smokers in the UK pay taxes to fund the NHS just like everyone else there. If you tout universal healthcare funded through general tax revenues, it is a wicked hypocrisy to deny service on the grounds of the “lifestyle choices” of taxpayers.
Hmm… if “lifestyle choices” are going to be used to determine who does or does not receive medical care, why shouldn’t this sort of discrimination be extended to, say, homosexuals who contract AIDS or drug addicts who contract diseases through intravenous injections?
If someone’s irresponsible behavior such as seriously over-eating or heavy smoking is what is actually causing the problem, or even contributing to the severity, why should the “collective” waste resources on someone unwilling to even help themselves?
But then, I think that drug abusers should be left to face the consequences of their actions too, so what do I know.
Or sports injuries? Or deciding to drive a car? There are much lower risk profile alternatives to pretty much everything. Why stop at drug or food abuse?
… and what will the AIDS patients have to give up ? Or if that is too unnnnncummmmmfterble a question … then how about treatment for any other STD? How will THOSE patients “behavior” be “modified”? Be patted on the head and told to use a condom? And do you have any idea how much $$$ HIV drugs cost?? Pay up taxpayer suckers
The exorbitant taxes that smokers pay on their tobacco products are predicated on the assumption that these taxes are needed to pay for the health care cost of tobacco use.
How is it that Healthcare Stalinists whose living is paid with taxes should even DARE to deny the prepaid services which they must provide?
This is outright fraud.
Tobacco products are a LEGAL thing to buy. Tobacco users should form a lobby and sue the government in a class action suite against government and it’s healthcare providers up until these taxes either become VOID or the government declares tobacco products become illegal.
As I have said, the taxes that tobacco users have paid, day in and day out, weekly and monthly and yearly, have entitled these payers of the tax to healthcare services, BY DINT of having paid the taxes in the first place, period.
It doesn’t matter if healthcare providers think without ever proving on a patient-by-patient basis that tobacco use caused the malady.
These healthcare workers are no different from any other worker and they should DO THEIR JOB instead of being allowed to opt out and instead TAKE A KNEE while people suffer and die for want of a truly moral helper. The health crisis may or not have caused by tobacco.
Lets say it was caused by tobacco use for sake of argument.
These people have PRE-paid for the health service with the tax that was taken from them by the government at SALE of the TOBACCO product.
The healthcare providers live off of other people’s taxes.
It is fraud and theft to refuse to provide the service while taking the pay, today and tomorrow.
Well said.
Well, welcome to socialism. It is only logical that the provider of your “free” healthcare would start inisting upon a certain behavior. Next the official diet. And when that cannot be afforded by all, state-provideed food. Socialism doesn’t stop until control of the population is total; it’s a logical progression and the declared goal. See Plato’s Republic.
Look, we could spend every last cent on healthcare and, currently, we still will get sick and die. So it must be rationed, either by cost or queue-theory (bureaucratic force). With private, or voluntary insurance, healthcare the choice of treatment becomes a medical and financial one; with state healthcare, it becomes a political choice.
I was in a car accident (guy ran a stop sign and smashed me) and I’m busted up inside …. ruptured spleen, etc. I need an operation to save my life. “Well, since you smoke we can schedule you for treatment in 8 weeks, but only if you quit …. it appear now that you will quit so consider it scheduled.
Thanks doc. I knew I could count on the NHS.
What about us beer drinkers?
And yet the LibTards excoriated Sarah Palin for her “death panels” assertions about ObamaCare.
Well, well, well; seems she was right as rain.
I’ll git STRAD right on that one for you!!!
How about drinkers? Or is that still an acceptable choice?
In 1978, when my brother, after his aircraft he was piloting crashed, was in an area of University Hospital in Edmonton in which the patients most of whom were snowmobile accidents were not expected to survive. Should dangerous sports participants be excluded from health care?
+ 1 Couldn’t have said it better myself.
this is a form of eugenics, plain and simple.
start from that position.