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Thursday, January 03, 2008

Bad news for fat smokers

Dr Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute has some harsh words for the government's new brainwave of withholding NHS treatment from people who are overweight or smokers:
The government's suggestion - however tentative - that people who are overweight or won't quit smoking shouldn't get treated by Britain's state-run National Health Service is outrageous.

These people have paid their taxes - smokers have probably paid more than most - for what we're told is a state 'insurance' system. What commercial health insurer would be allowed to take your money and then refuse to pay out on the grounds that your lifestyle was politically incorrect?
Quite so.  We might also ask, why should the government stop with the NHS?  Surely the principle can be extended throughout the welfare state: why is the government not proposing also to withhold child benefit from unmarried mothers?  why shouldn't old age pensions be withheld from people who have not had the foresight to save for their own retirement?  Apart from the fact that any such suggestion would (rightly) scandalise public opinion, any such suggestion would impact one of the government's favoured groups.  In a society where the ongoing struggle against racism, sexism, ageism, disablism and homophobia has done away with all our traditional scapegoats, new ones have to be found from somewhere.  It may not be fashionable to discriminate against drinkers, but it is fine to discriminate against smokers; it is considered very bad form these days to be judgemental about lone parents or the gay community, but for some reason what is never called "the obese community" is fair game.

The reality is that the targetting of smokers and the overweight is indicative of a wider problem.  The inconsistency in goverment thinking masks a more fundamental and mundane, yet crucial, point: the threat to withdraw treatment from certain classes of person is an implicit admission that the NHS cannot deliver the universal health care it is supposed to provide.  And this is a point that some of us have been making for a very long time.

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