Viewing 3 posts - 41 through 43 (of 43 total)
  • HEALTHCARE : The Sedentary Lifestyle Choice or the Herbert Spencer Option?
  • julianwilson
    Free Member

    Smokers might be a net contributors to the govt. Not only do smokers pay high taxes but they don’t draw pensions for very long if at all.

    Nope. A single night in hospital costs hundreds these days, it is very easy to spend your whole life’s contribution in tobacco duty relatively quickly on gp appointments, outpatients, COPD specialist nurses, prescriptions and so on, and that’s before you become a cancer patient or ‘revolving door’ COPD inpatient. And of course the better we get at prolonging life by treating COPD, lung, mouth and throat cancer the less your net contribution helps. Besides, it is most unclear how much of tobacco duty raised is actually put into the health budget at a national level. 😕

    Furthermore, I honestly don’t know about the rest of the country but the ‘bootleg baccy’ trade is still so bouyant in the south west that most ‘savvy’ smokers here actually fund healthcare in France and Holland.

    TheSouthernYeti
    Free Member

    my heroin line

    You’re doing it wrong.

    swiss01
    Free Member

    i think the op’s missing the essential point of private healthcare i.e. the provider doesn’t care how fat/unfit or whatever you are so long as you can pay for it.

    which makes the liver figures for englandshire released today interesting reading. true, as expected the ‘lower orders’ are well represented but not that well represented. a significant part of those figures are well, people like stw. could be you were a steamer in your early days, could be you’re a woman who just doesn’t know when too much really is too much, could be that wee brush of hepatitis you got is making a daring comeback.

    is your insurance going to cover this? i think not. and neither will it cover your wee granny when she’s got the dementia. or your child if it’s got diabetes.

    so while the ‘let them die’ argument would make parts of my life much, much easier i’d like to see some action to back this up. perhaps advocates of this approach would have the nads to apply this criteria to them and theirs. i’ve seen exactly zero evidence of this throughout my career. or maybe they could volunteer to do the turning away in the transitional phase of such a system?

    i’ve only met (aside from jehovah’s and one rasta) one person who walked it like they talked it the face of serious deisease. she had non-hodgkins lymphoma and was ‘particular’ about what drugs she’d take or what blood products. i won’t say my colleagues were much impressed but i was and it was both a challenge and a joy to look after her until she died on her terms.

    and for those blubbing about how ‘their’ healthcare would be so much cheaper once the markets sort out ‘gold plated’ types like me – i was earning more in 1990 working in the states than i would in an equivocal post now. and i didn’t work in a money making area!

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Viewing 3 posts - 41 through 43 (of 43 total)

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