For the government, if it wanted to cut NHS costs whilst simultaneously increasing growth in the UK, cutting alcohol consumption would be a very obvious thing to do.
Nope:
Fatties, boozers and gaspers save the NHS money, not cost it.
It is a lifetime health care system. As we all know the majority of lifetime health care costs are in that final 6 months. Those final 6 months happen to everyone. Thus the major determinant of lifetime costs is how many years are the other costs to be bourne? Those with shorter lifespans cost less…..
Isn’t moderate alcohol consumption good for you anyway? Also, if I want to drink myself into an early grave it’s nobody’s business but my own. The costing the NHS argument isn’t an argument for poking your nose into other people’s life choices, it’s an argument against socialised healthcare.
The usual from Spud. “I don’t drink much (I am wise and virtuous for doing so) and I don’t understand why other people do. The government should do something about it. Here is what they should do…..”
He really is a nasty, authoritarian fucker, isn’t he?
Just when you thought you couldn’t hate him any more he comes out with something else.
As Andrew C makes the point let’s apply Spud logic to various other areas:
There is, of course, medical evidence to support the fact that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a concept that is decidedly harmful to our health. That means Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is much more detrimental to our well-being than many banned substances. Its impact on demand for NHS mental health services is also significant, and is now much greater than that from tobacco. It could also be having a negative impact on economic productivity, and much else in life.
So let’s abolish ‘DIE’ and ‘Net Zero’ and Trans conversion? Or perhaps one person’s experience isn’t the best means of justifying changes in policy?
And the notion that this isn’t constantly being talked about, and acted on, by the sinister ‘Public Health lobby’ is for the birds. Sunak put an additional pound on a bottle of wine for Christ’s sake.
As The excellent Jimmers points out – he is a thoroughly evil and obnoxious totalitarian who enjoys telling other people what to do, an attitude that saw him banned from every hostelry in Downham Market and lose a potentially lucrative job as Shadow Chief economic advisor to Jeremy Corbyn.
My response to this lifestyle question is usually along the lines of:
Having socialised healthcare doesn’t not give you the right to determine how I live because it never stops. If you want me to carry the costs of my lifestyle switch to an insurance based system and let the market decide how much more I should pay. (See also smoking, sport, over eating etc etc.)
Smokers and drinkers subsidise the NHS, especially if they set fire to the bedclothes or wander in front of a truck.
But here are some expensive conditions the NHS has to deal with
The effects of veganism. Mostly young middle class women.
Treatment of congenital abnormality. Mostly due to cousin marriage.
Diabetes. A huge imbalance between certain ethnicities.
Risky behaviour. Mostly young men.
Drugs and crime. Mostly lower class young men with failed education.
Mental health. Aggravated by government policies from 2020.
HIV / AIDS. Affecting only a certain subset of the population, easily identifiable each June.
Unlike booze and fags these conditions are not accounted for in taxation. But I’m hopeful a political economist with accountancy qualifications can be persuaded to construct a suitable progressive tax regime to target the costs to the public.
“Fatties, boozers and gaspers save the NHS money, not cost it.”
Not so sure about that. You pay the NHS – through taxes rather than through direct payment, but you pay.
Someone who has ends up in that expensive last 6 months of life at age 50 instead of age 80 has paid the NHS taxes for 30 less years, so has likely paid for less of those expensive months.
For that matter, someone who’s 400 pounds at age 17 and dies then, has probably not paid *any* taxes, so they’re a dead loss and their end of life care has to be paid for completely by others.
I think the way people thought they would save money on “Fatties, boozers and gaspers” would be if they have a heart attack and are dead right there, so no hospital stay involved. This was likely the case back in the 70s, but not so much now.
I almost feel sorry for the cvnt, almost.
The only thing in life that seems to bring him joy is tax, more types of tax and higher rates. And maybe toy train sets. And birds, feathered ones.
M
Perhaps you’re forgetting the additional consumption taxes that drinkers and smokers fork out over their lifetimes (even when truncated by their vices).
Also…I have the feeling that your 400lb 17 year old is not a statistically significant occurrence. I’m happy to be proved wrong on that point.
Geoffers:
Yes, the sin taxes do make up for some of it. I’m Canadian, so I have no idea what the tax structure is like in Britain. Googling, it looks like the price per pack seems to be about the same in pounds in England as it is in Canadian dollars in Ontario. Tax (federal & provincial) seems to make up about half of the price.
But two cartons a week (3 packs a day) is about $150/week, or just under $8k/year, or about $250k in tax if you kick off at age 50. Assuming you start smoking at 18 and go right to 3 packs a day. Since most smokers start earlier, but don’t start right at 3 a day, it works out more or less.
Am extra $250k is not nothing, but I suspect the extra income tax and VAT from the 15 extra years to age 65 (and the years after that to 80) likely means the taxman is still ahead for the nonsmoker.
I do know that in Canada there’s a bit of a limit to how high those taxes can go. If they go too high, the Indian cross-border reservations start getting lots of business (and weapons), and you end up with lots of black market traffic. England used to have a lot of cross-Channel smuggling; perhaps that’s gone down if the prices aren’t too different.
Fatties, boozers and gaspers save the NHS money, not cost it.
That’s highly questionable when 26% of those aged 75+ are obese and 43% are overweight (Source: NHS Digital, Health Survey for England 2021, Table 1). The problem is that the NHS is rather good at keeping fatties, boozers and gaspers alive despite their multiple co-morbidities. And 90% of people with type-2 diabetes are obese or at least overweight.
Two examples: 1. A friend of mine, a lifetime smoker, has been in and out of hospital over the last 30 years with various smoking-related heart and lung problems. He is now dying of lung cancer, aged 77, because he has refused chemotherapy etc. 2. My obese brother-in-law developed type-2 diabetes over 15 years ago. He receives regular checkups, which have identified various other conditions – eg in-growing toenail (free chiropody for diabetics, an inguinal hernia and high blood pressure
Sanity check: the heavy smokers and heavy drinkers tend not to be all that rich. So they just can’t pay that much in our progressive tax systems.
By far the majority of cost of care (as distinct from management and fixed, non-variable, costs of other staff) is on women (“Which” reckons a private sector pregnancy costs over £15,000 – a NHS pregnancy with lower quality but also lower efficiency will cost nearly as much); last-year-of-life NHS costs are said to be a bit under £6k so *significantly* less than half the cost of a pregnancy.
Those of us who hardly ever see the GP, let alone a hospital, cost very little until we conk out so almost certainly less in our 80+ years than fatty does in her/his 50 so it is simply *wrong* to apply her/his higher annual cost to our greater number of years. [The cost of the ‘flu jab for over-70s is trivial]. Better health and fitness makes us more resistant to colds and ‘flu and help us to recover from other illnesses without being rushed into hospital; also we tend to pay more taxes on income, offsetting the lower take from tobacco duty.
However – getting back to Murphy, he is wrong as usual. Alcohol-related disease is a tiny fraction of NHS costs and the MSM talked about the spending on beer etc on Saturday adding £3bn to UK GDP which will boost the figures for economic growth under Labour.
If they *really* weanted to cut NHS costs while boosting growth they could reintroduce tax breaks forthe cost of privste-sector medical care, thereby cutting NHS waiting times and enabling the sick/disabled to return to productive work sooner.
John77 says
If they *really* weanted to cut NHS costs while boosting growth they could reintroduce tax breaks forthe cost of privste-sector medical care, thereby cutting NHS waiting times and enabling the sick/disabled to return to productive work sooner.
There used to be a pathway where if your treatment was delayed beyond a certain point you could elect to go abroad and the NHS would pay. (S2 it was called I think.) It wasn’t actually abolished when we left the EU but it’s nearly impossible to do now.
Given that costs in the EU are often much cheaper than the UK the NHS would actually save money as well as shortening the waiting lists by using it.
But they won’t. Not socialist enough.
Likewise, out of 80,000 prisoners over 10,000 are foreign. A Rwanda style agreement to repatriate these cons to serve their sentences would free up a lot of cells. Prison crisis solved.
But they won’t. Those foreign parts aren’t as civilised as our jails.
Theo,
That’s highly questionable when 26% of those aged 75+ are obese and 43% are overweight (Source: NHS Digital, Health Survey for England 2021, Table 1).
This YouTube channel specialises in advice for the over 50s. In this video on bad health advice for over 50s he makes the point that over 50s need to be at the higher end of the BMI normal and lower end of the overweight range and that the government now agrees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_G3-CMRH30
I’ve spent the last two days balanced on two ladders replacing old wooden (heavy!) guttering. You’ll get my mini-battenbergs out of my cold dead hands!
“A Rwanda style agreement to repatriate these cons”: or parachutes.
In fact parachutes would be useful complements to Steve’s lions and dearieme’s machine-gunners.
@M – “the heavy smokers and heavy drinkers tend not to be all that rich. So they just can’t pay that much in our progressive tax systems”
There’s nothing progressive about the taxes on tobacco or alcohol.
A 20 a day smoker pays an extra £2,500 a year in tax.
In any case, it is worth restating Bloke in North Dorset’s point:
If you want me to carry the costs of my lifestyle switch to an insurance based system and let the market decide how much more I should pay.
Don’t provide a ‘free at the point of use’ service to the nation and then moan that some people get more out of it.
Funnily enough, I was in an NHS hospital on Saturday. Some right fat fuckers in there I grant you. And some of the patients were pretty porky too.
When the prodnoses start campaigning against ‘self-inflicted’ conditions that ‘take valuable resources from our NHS’, suggest that if they want to be consistent, they need to ban abortion.
Thank you snag!!!
Pension payments to the over 68s will outweigh any tax receipts from all but a tiny minority. What the exchequer wants is for you to die the day before you start collecting your state pension.
Some people will have “cheap” deaths where they pass suddenly. Accidents or fatal heart attacks out-of-the-blue leave people going from not requiring any major medical attention because they’re fine to not requiring any medical attention because it’s too late. Some will require expensive drugs, many-most will require some form of care for the last portion of their lives. I can’t find any statistics on whether smokers/boozers/etc. are more or less likely than the general population to fall into the former/latter categories.
“Some right fat fuckers in there I grant you. And some of the patients were pretty porky too”
Saw a picture in the paper today of Starmer & Streeting visiting a “patient” in a NHS hospital. Said patient could charitably be described as morbidly obese, and not particularly old, either…
“The cost of the ‘flu jab for over-70s is trivial. ”
Also completely effing pointless.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-3075?_ga=2.114195335.1018164567.1690725746-1383712439.1690725746
Ever since I read that paper I’ve given up on the flu jab which I’d been taking for donkeys’.
Also vaccine-related. Maybe the anti-vaccine obsessives had some good points after all. Did you ever?
https://icandecide.org/press-release/stanley-plotkin-worlds-leading-vaccinologist-and-his-compatriots-have-just-capitulated-regarding-the-lack-of-vaccine-safety/
@ Matt
True, but everyone else (in this thread) is looking at cost only to the NHS, not to the DWP.
There are statistics showing that smokers are more likely to develope many types of cancer (not just lung cancer) so requiring medical care for a long painful period (sometimes months but usually several years) before dying; that obese persons are far more likely to develop type 2 diabetes and require drugs and care, sometimes for decades, and significantly more likely to develope heart disease and more likely to develope various other conditions that require continual treatment.
Heavy drinkers are more likely to get cirrhosis of the liver but I suspect that it’s not a noticeable (let alone a major or significant) cost to the NHS because we never get numbers on it from the Grauniad or other “woke” suppliers of “news” and a bit more likely to suffer heart disease.
One of the problems is that those gathering data for statistics on those requiring care in later life (or “life”) are mostly interested in the cost to the local authority or, secondly, the individual/family paying and rarely, if ever, to the reason why they need care (and, even if they did care there is rarely a single reason: it is usually a combination of several causes; if an ex-rugby player suffers dementia at 80 is that due to blows to the head when it hits the ground or the gallons of beer drunk after matches?).
One notices no one is counting the cost of years of sharing space with miserable, old, non-smoking, teetotallers. Not everything can be moneterised.
Incidentally, do you not find this point of view being promulgated by a lardarse in a bulging Marks & Spencer cardigan somewhat hypercritical?