Do you support privatisation of preventable health conditions?

18 comments

1. As in they don’t get treated on the NHS? Dead against it. It’s a terrible idea that doesn’t stand up to even a few seconds of thinking about how it would actually work in practice.

2. No, this is a slippery slope.

3. Lol no. I have a chronic illness I got from a skin infection… You could argue that the chronic illness was preventable if I hadn’t gotten that infection…

   What about age-related conditions? Or obesity caused by an underlying issue such as a thyroid issue?

4. How do you define preventable? Broken leg from parachuting? Fell over drunk?

   How do you prove what caused the illness? How do you know they wouldn’t have got lung cancer even if they didn’t smoke?

5. No.

   What I do approve of is charging people for wasting time.

   Keep it free at the point of treatment, then if the Doctor/Nurse feel you’ve crossed the threshold into wasting their time, you get a bill for it in the post.

   Sister is a nurse in A and E and says she spends a lot more time than she should dealing with entitled time wasters than people who genuinely need to be in an A&E department.

6. No, that’s completely barbaric certainly for obesity.

   Where would you draw the line, as you sure as hell can’t use BMI as that’s useless, so I guess you’d then go on body fat %, so you then need to have a body composition test each time you go to the doctors to see if the illness is because your fat or not?

   With smoking, I always assumed as its a small fortune for a packet of cigarettes that it’s all due to tax so the government are getting the money kinda anyway.

7. No, I want to keep all illnesses and injuries in public ownership, imagine if a government contracted company like Serco were given the responsibility to make you ill!

8. Breast cancer risks are higher if you drink, and 80% of adults drink alcohol – does that mean most people shouldn’t get breast cancer treated for free?

9. So are you going to include all alcohol related heath issues, all issues women suffer from been pregnant/after pregnancy, all sport related injuries, etc, etc.

10. Yeah, fine, go ahead. But keep your hands out of my pay packet. Why should I pay for people who injure themselves through stupidity, which covers most injuries? That’s the conclusion of what you suggest.

    You can’t pick and choose. Either you want a public health system that treats everyone’s illnesses or you don’t.

    If you want to suggest something maybe look at how healthcare works in France or Germany, but this is an infantile and impractical suggestion.

11. Either you’d be privatising pretty much everything or you’d be making moral judgements about what is acceptable behaviour that causes you health problems and what isn’t.

    Do people who use cars have to pay if they get in an accident? Do people who live in cities have to pay if they develop asthma. Do people have to pay for their children’s treatment if they have a genetic condition that they know they might pass on?

    So no, this would be a dystopian nightmare

12. No. My dad had a heart attack some years ago as a result of work stress, and if he’d moved jobs it likely wouldn’t have happened. By your logic, he should be charged for it as it was preventable, but it ignores the fact that often “preventable” diseases are still things that are out of control.

13. What about playing sports? Football and rugby for example. Do you want to price people out of playing sports, doing DIY, skiiing, driving, gardening? Do you want to make healthy food more affordable than fastfood, and give people more time off work to prepare and cook it? Nutrition education and cooking classes? Where would you have the cut off? Tripped and broke your ankle – you should have looked where you were going and I don’t see why my tax should treat that. It’s unworkable because it is arbitrary.

14. Prove any related condition is caused by the preventable condition

    Almost anything can be related to smoking and a large number of things to obesity. Does a smoker not get treatment for 80% of conditions because they can be linked to smoking, even though I’m their case it might not be caused by that?

    If I have high blood pressure in my family, but I’m also overweight, do I get treatment or not? How do you know my HBP is due to the weight and not genetics?

    And if my kid goes skateboarding and breaks their leg, so they have to pay too, as it was entirely preventable by not skateboarding?

    If someone crosses the road without looking and is hit by a car, are we hitting them in the wallet too?

    And that time when you ended up in A&E and you happened to have had a glass of two of wine, totally unrelated to your injury… Well, I guess that’s going to cost you.

15. No, it sounds impractical. However I would support more obesity related taxes like expanding the sugar tax to cover confectionary & biscuits and perhaps even a PAYE surcharge for being obese.

16. I don’t support privatisation of anything

17. What about mental health issues? Stress?

    How do you determine what exactly causes health issues?

    Do you want a society that creates scenarios where people won’t go to a GP or hospital if they are I’ll because they are afraid of the cost?

    Go and live in USA if you don’t like our universal free healthcare.

18. If it’s some drunken lout clogging up A&E on a weekend, then hell yes.