Diabetes threatens to \’bankrupt\’ NHS within a generation
Treatment will use £16.9bn of budget as the number of diabetics rises from 3.8m patients to 6.25m by 2035
I don\’t really see what the problem is. We pay for the NHS to treat any diseases or illnesses that we might develop. More of us get diabetes? Well, that\’s what the NHS is for.
However, the important part of this is here:
Their research, funded by the drugs company Sanofi, also examined the costs of diabetes to the UK as a whole.
What does Sanofi make? Diabetes drugs.
Diabetes UK have just sold themselves out lock stock and barrel.
And if you point this out to them, then they certainly won’t reply with “Nuh uh”
What are you talking about? A diabetes drug company wants to know how much the disease is likely to cost the NHS in the future, in order to predict how much money they can make. They pay some “health economists” to guess at this figure. The Guardian journalist reads the report, doesn’t understand it, so shows it to the head of a diabetes charity and tries to get some hyperbolic quotes for his headline. What exactly is the problem here?
Couple of points:
1. Are we seeing another glorious fallacy of extrapolating a current trend far into the future?
2. Diabetics die younger, don’t they? So the NHS won’t be paying out on the really expensive stuff of old age.
BTW, inconvenient reports only have to be wrapped in plastic to be denounced as biased lobbying from ‘Big Oil’, but convenient ones will always be paraded as selfless sources of concrete fact.
Diabetes would be cheaper if they hadn’t incentivised GPs to instruct every newly diagnosed diabetic to start taking statins “for the duration”. And perhaps if they hadn’t lowered the test threshold for the diagnosis of diabetes.
What I did: I had a look on the contents list on packets of supermarket muesli, stopped buying the stuff and mixed my own instead. And laid off most fruit juice too. (Tomato juice seems to be much less sugary than most.)
There’s a good muesli recipe in the splendid wee pocket book from Collins gem “GL”.
John: that’s naive. The diabetes charities have put their names on the press release. And it’s highly unlikely that the journalist has read the report – hyperbolic quotes from charities come pre-packaged.
Personally, i look forward to the bankruptcy of the Multi-cultural Welfare State.
Bring it on!
I see no problem.
There is no result which will benefit Sanofi directly.
The uncorrected version of the Groan piece was a hanging offence, though.