UK Government consider plans to deny NHS treatment to smokers and obese

[Peter]

The government seems to have gotten itself into something of a rut with the health service in recent years, and not just in terms of actually getting the thing to churn out the "non-emergency/critical" stuff at good value, but also at setting a working agenda on the preventitive health care issues.

Its main thrust seems to have been on eliminating "health inequalities" between the classes. Problem is that this is very difficult. Whilst the generalisations I am about to make are by no means true across the broad, they do apply to the majority of the respective social class.

Working class adults tend to be more likely to smoke and to have an unhealthy diet. Middle class adults tend not to smoke and to have a healthier diet (though I wouldn't necessarily call the diet healthy, just not as bad). The causes of this are several, not least the fact that it is cheaper and more convenient to eat unhealthely.

With that as the general baseline of the population, it becomes very difficult to eliminate the health inequalities because those in the working classes are not looking after their bodies as much as their middle class counterparts do.

For the record, this is due to change in the coming decades. The present generation of middle class teenagers and students, drink as much (if not more) as their working class counterparts (and by this I mean binge drinking), and by leaps and bounds take more drugs. However, they don't smoke, whilst working class kids tend to. Quite what this means for the long term health of the respective classes, I'm not sure.

Back to point - this is what ultimately is prompting this policy - in order to eliminate health inequalities the government is attempting to force an on the whole more unhealthy class to be more healthy in order to meet its objective. Problem is that it will probably cut off several of the working class from the health service, thus further damaging their long term health.