Tuesday 15 February 2011

NHS - Nothing left to treat.

Whatever happened to the destruction of the NHS to be wrought by smokers? It seems we've been demoted.

It now appears that drinkers will overwhelm the NHS by 2015. Dog Shagger, of Puritans United, stated -

"With the prime minister saying that NHS is becoming 'increasingly unaffordable', we can show how billions can be saved simply by introducing alcohol health workers in hospitals to help patients reduce their drinking."

Yes, by employing Dog's Puritan Army on the public payroll, all drinkers will immediately say 'You know, I think I'll just stop'. These new tax parasites will prove to be just as effective as all those playtime managers in schools. Note that when I was young there were no playtime managers and hardly any obesity. Now? Loads of anti-obesity parasites and kids you can roll to school.

What will really happen is that, just as with ASH, Dog's Tax-fed Puritans will soon realise that if they succeed in stopping all boozing, they will be out of a job. So, like ASH, they will propose harsher and harsher incremental controls on the back of imaginary 'studies', but will be careful never to actually solve the problem. Just like the playtime managers. If they solve childhood obesity, they're out of work.

Obesity, now classified as a disease in itself, is due to overload the NHS by 2050 even if it survives the drinkers.

Professor James, a former Government adviser on public health, said: “Obesity is the single biggest threat to our health service.

I've met him. Yes, he is what this statement makes him appear.

It's fun to watch these single-interest groups vie for importance now there's no money. Dog Shagger wants to save the NHS money by putting all his people on the NHS payroll to be Government-employed prohibitionists. Then along comes Miniature Phil to state no, forget the booze, it's obesity that needs to be funded. Any moment now the Dreadful Arnott must surely pipe up with 'Pah, booze and fat? Trivia! We must eradicate the smokers!'

Meanwhile, high-blood-pressure commenters spout 'They must pay for treatment! Why are they not paying?' The answer, as Snowolf points out, is that they already are. If you want smokers, drinkers and chubbies to be excluded from the NHS, the ECHR will waste no time in allowing those people to exclude themselves from National Insurance payments. Oh, but the swivel-eyed demand we pay NI, but also that we don't make use of the service it allegedly pays for. They regard that as 'fair'.

I have a simple solution to all of it. Shut down the NHS.

It has admitted that it cannot cope with the three primary causes of all illness - fat, smoke and booze - therefore it is of no value at all. There are no other recognised causes of illness any more and if the NHS won't treat these three then it is not treating anything. Therefore it is a behemoth of tax waste, nothing more.

There will be those who cry 'But we must keep the NHS'. Why? What's it for? Anyone who gets sick has to pay for private treatment anyway. If you've had a sherry, the NHS won't treat you. If you tip the scales at an ounce over the British Standard Human weight, the NHS won't treat you. If you once heard about someone who smoked a cigar, forty years ago, the NHS won't treat you. So who is it treating? The healthy? Why?

'But I never drink and don't go near smokers and am perfect weight. I need the NHS in case I fall over and sprain something one day'. Really? You want a multi-billion organisation twiddling several million thumbs just in case you might need a bandage one day? That is what the NHS is heading for, you know. Everyone could get private insurance for a tenth of their NI contributions and they would not be turned away just because they wear a size larger than the Government approves of.

If there were no NHS, then all those red-faced taxpayers in the comments pages of the papers could relax. Nobody, no matter how ill, would cost any of them a penny. Think of the savings in blood-pressure treatments. What's that? We need the NHS to look after the poor? But most of the poor smoke, drink and/or are overweight. So the NHS won't treat them anyway. The poor will be the bulk of those turned away by the Temperance Health Service, so no, it's not there to help the poor.

Between all these pressure groups, the NHS is left with nobody to treat because anyone ill is automatically excluded. You can argue it only applies to drunks but define 'drunk'. Define it in the context of the zero-tolerance society where you can be done for drink-driving if you put aftershave on. You can argue that it's only for 'the obese' but that definition has already been narrowing for years. You can argue that it only affects smokers, but third hand smoke means that if you live or work with a smoker, or met one once, you're contaminated.

The NHS will soon charge everyone - everyone - to use a service they've already paid for. Does that mean the service will at last improve, or does it mean that admin will expand and drive more big cars? It doesn't take much thinking about.

There is no further purpose in having an NHS at all. The only people it's truly free for are the health tourists. We are subsidising the health of everyone else on the planet and if we want to use it, we have to pay twice. We will also have to run the gauntlet of five-a-day coordinators, temperance demanders, antismoking zealots and the Size Zero Brigade before we get anywhere near any treatment. We could all get medical insurance for a fraction of the cost, and no private hospital would give the bansturbators a penny.

The NHS is finished. Shut it down.

Update - Shut it down before you get old.

13 comments:

banned said...

The whole anti-drinking bollox is predicated on (from your link)

"A quarter of British adults drink more than the recommended daily limit of two units for a women, three for men".
ie one pint for a woman or one and a half pints for a man.

To call that 'binge-drinking' is self evidently absurd and makes a mockery of their entire argument just as looking out of the window gives the lie to manmadeglobalwarming.

kitler said...

They probably get their science from the people on the TV ads who claim a child dies every 3 seconds in Africa. A quick check on my calculator tells me that means over a hundred million kids die there every decade.

I have no idea if this is true or not but I do know that if resources are scarce in Africa then increasing its population by 100 million every decade is hardly going to help. It just means a 100 million more starving breeders breeders for the west to feed.

Lucky for them foreign aid has been ringfenced I suppose.

makes you proud said...

Yes there's something seriously wrong with some NHS procedures. My relative was in hospital with terminal cancer and a broken arm.
He struggled to do his crossword as his finger nails were too long. I asked a nurse if they could be cut and she said no, because of 'health and safety'. I took clippers on my next visit and was planning to cut his nails on the sly but he was sadly dead. 50 years he paid into the system and about a week of care he got. Spent staring at the ceiling . Bored and dying. Scary.

PJH said...

"If you want smokers, drinkers and chubbies to be excluded from the NHS, the ECHR will waste no time in allowing those people to exclude themselves from National Insurance payments. Oh, but the swivel-eyed demand we pay NI, but also that we don't make use of the service it allegedly pays for. They regard that as 'fair'."


Erm - what about all that extra tax that's placed on cigarettes and booze - don't we get that back as well?

(Sadly there doesn't appear to be an equivalent on food - since some of it doesn't even attract VAT.)

And what about the state pension we won't be claiming because we're "dying earlier." I want that claimed back too!

Mark Wadsworth said...

"[The NHS] has admitted that it cannot cope with the three primary causes of all illness - fat, smoke and booze - therefore it is of no value at all."

Genius.

Anonymous said...

It's getting to a pont where the ridiculous paradox of Catch 22 is going to be the norm. i.e. The only way to get out of flying suicidal missions is if you're crazy, but if you want to get out of flying suicidal missions then you obviously aren't crazy.

So the NHS is there to treat the ill and injured, but the NHS won't treat the ill and injured because it costs money to treat them.

RAB said...

When real figures, i.e sales figures are looked at, rather than the hysterical rantings of the likes of Alcohol Concern, you find that Britons are actually drinking less, not more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12397254

So either the assertion that people being treated for alcohol misuse has doubled since 2002 as stated by Alcohol Concern, is a flat out lie, or the Tippler's equivilent of "Who ate all the Pies?"

delcretin said...

My mother spent her last 5 months in the care of the NHS. I witnessed her decline day by day. Bitter doesn't even start to describe how I feel. Each night I visited, the first thing she wanted, nay begged for was a drink of water. Food served at lunchtime still on the tray at 7 in the evening. Isolation due to hospital aquired infections, filthy toilets and washing areas, disrespect for privacy, general indifference around the staff who didn't give a damn and the smell of fear around the staff who would have liked to be free to care were it not for regulation, pc, health and safety, threat of litigation etc,. Hair uncombed and bedraggled. Glasses out of reach. Teeth untreated. Nightdress unwashed. I could go on. And all this under a Labour mind you a Labour, government. Bitter? I am still *@#!ing furious after all these years and knowing what I know would sooner create my own squalor in the comfort of my own home in which to die than auction my fortunes to strangers. Am I allowed to do that? If not, tough!

Anonymous said...

I’ve always been a great supporter of the NHS, for all its faults, but you’ve put the case for its abandonment so well that I can’t help but sadly agree, if things keep on going the way they look like they are.

The only alternative that I can see (and it would take a braver politician to suggest it than any of the lot we currently have) is to take the NHS right back to its roots. Grab it by the neck like the spoiled brat it has now become, give it a good shake, and allow it to do one thing, and one thing only – to treat people when they are ill or injured. Sling out all the hangers-on and their associated functions – the tattoo removal services, cosmetic and plastic surgery except when associated with an illness or an accident, infertility treatment, NHS quit smoking helplines and support groups, alcohol advisers, obesity police, counsellors, travel vaccinations, MOT-style healthchecks, screening services – the list is endless. If people want these things when they’re not actually ill, they can pay for them. And along with disposing of all these expensive add-on functions, a whole host of administrators, managers, pen-pushers, and record-keepers would go, too. Imagine the huge savings they’d make!

Pretty quickly, the insurance industry would surely cotton on to the fact that there would be a big market for insurance policies for “non-NHS-treatable” services and no doubt some canny company would develop one, which would almost certainly be considerably cheaper than the current “catch all” policies which many people can’t afford or can’t take advantage of because they have a “pre-existing” condition.

Just some thoughts .....

Leg-iron said...

Banned - drinking has been on the decline for a long time. The problem is not drinkers, but violent drunks.

If the courts stop accepting 'I were smashed, innit' as an excuse and punished the actual crime, the problem would go away.

Sure, there'd still be the harmless drunks, but they aren't damaging anyone but themselves.

Leg-iron said...

Kitler - reminds me of Bono on stage, clapping his hands every three seconds and saying 'Every time I clap my hands, a child dies in Africa'.

Some brilliant wit piped up 'Well stop clapping then'.

Really took the edge of that particular guilt-fest.

Leg-iron said...

PJH - I have seeds and yeast. For the moment I know a man with a van. Soon I won't need any external sources of tobacco or booze.

Except malt whiskies. I am not waiting ten years! But they can be brought back by many overseas travellers who don't drink.

No, we won't get the duty back and we will get nothing but abuse for pauying it. So I won't.

Leg-iron said...

makes you proud, Delcretin, Anon, - I now avoid all contact with anyone on the NHS because I know they don't treat illnesses any more.

I see proud declarations of 'Smoke-free' outside hospitals I know are riddled with MRSA, C. difficile and more hospital acquired infections than the MSM have ever heard of.

They don't want to treat me bnecause I smoke? Good. The idea of being put into one of those plague pits is terrifying. I'll take my chances with the possible effects of smoking against the definite dead-next-week effect of MRSA.

Let the Righteous have it all. Including the diseases.

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