What should the NHS not fund?

[Username721]

Saw a thread on IVF for lesbians and some people felt that IVF should not be for anyone on the NHS. So it got me thinking.

Is there anything you feel should be exclusively private treatment? The ones often debated are things like weight loss surgery, cosmetic procedures, treatment for avoidable illness such as smoking-induced ones, liver failure through alcohol abuse, drug rehabilitation…

Thoughts?

Gender reassignment. Breast enlargement. Although breast reduction should be available on NHS.

Would you scrap weight loss surgery too? That’s almost never a life or death situation either.

But what is cosmetic? What you may consider cosmetic someone else may consider necessary if it reduces other risks (inc to mental health). It's not necessarily straightforward.

If we got rid of it all, then people should pay for their own maternity care. You want to have a kid, you pay the ££££ is costs the NHS every time you want to have one. It’s not a right to have kids after all, and it’s self inflicted. So why not? No one ever wants to know when the argument is turned on its head!

Lots of treatments aren’t life saving. Lots of treatments are about improving quality of life. A hip replacement on an 80 year old isn’t life saving and you could argue that statistically the patient isn’t likely to live long enough to get more than 5-10 years use out of it but they’re still funded on the NHS. Cancer patients often continue to have treatments even after a terminal diagnosis to try and prolong life expectancy, if only by months, and improve quality of life. If you only wished to fund essential life saving treatment then there are a lot of treatments which would immediately go.

The ones often debated are things like weight loss surgery, cosmetic procedures, treatment for avoidable illness such as smoking-induced ones, liver failure through alcohol abuse, drug rehabilitation…

not sure about this what about people who speed and end up in a rta or extreme sport aficionados? also there are socioeconomic reasons around addiction.

It's a waste of money whoever the doctors are

Use of resources innit

I don't like or dislike trans people but I think gender reassignment surgery should be lower down the priority list

Shall I get my bingo card out?

Of course they're the same people. A breast surgeon is a breast surgeon. If they're doing gender reassignment "top surgery" then they're not a cancer surgery. There are opportunity costs to GRS. No surgeon trains in GRS exclusively. If the NHS is paying them, and funding theatres etc, to do one surgery, they're not doing another surgery. There are finite resources.

Everything

Odds of success for women under 35 according to the NHS website are 32%. So granted it's not the best odds but we're far from "incredibly small" chances.

I would controversially not fund HRT.

I cannot fathom the way of thinking that ‘self inflicted’ illnesses should not be funded by NHS. The NHS is not a free service, we pay for it through our taxes.

As per your example, if an alcoholic was suffering liver failure and they did not have the means to self fund, they should just.. die? I seriously doubt this approach would actually improve health, I don’t imagine it is anyones choice to be an alcoholic. I won’t even go down the rabbit hole of poverty being linked to obesity etc. What options would these people have? We would be throwing our most vulnerable to the wolves.

Agree with @SquashPenguin re IVF. Infertility can be a miserable existence. I cannot imagine denying anyone this treatment.

Anything that involves putting right surgery that was performed abroad

Noooo. I'd still have my bat ears! Not sure what we could have done about them ourselves... thank god for my lovely mum having them pinned back when I was 5 <preens at my lovely neat ears> 😁

Hearing aid batteries- we need to pay for glasses, pay for dentistry, even pay for prescription inhalers but we spend millions on providing batteries free of charge.

IVF and cosmetic surgery

Tests/investigations and aftercare for private surgeries. If you can't afford the full package then the NHS shouldn't be expected to pick up the cost.

DS had a squirt corrected at age 7. There was no impact on his vision and, in the words of the surgeon who added him to the NHS waiting list for it, it was done for cosmetic reasons.

So you'd give a heart, lung and liver transplant to an 85 year old rock star who'd taken drugs, smoked and drunk excessively all his adult life, but you'd deprive a healthy couple of the chance to have a child, due to one of them being sterile after a childhood cancer?

Paracetamol and other cheap over the counter medications.

It's thought that HRT may reduce heart disease and dementia in later life. So providing HRT may save money long-term if these conditions are avoided or delayed. Keeping women able to work and pay taxes longer is also a financial gain (i.e. women develop these conditions later than without HRT, or women don't need to provide care for those with these conditions), not to mention a quality of life issue.

See also weight loss surgery, if it saves costs in later life due to diabetes, heart disease, stroke, etc and reduces the number of people who too ill to work.

Absolutely agree. 100%.

Ivf & icsi should all go?? They do work, it worked for me, and many other people I know. So if that was the case, let's get rid of the MH funding then because I suppose it must be OK to suffer from extremely dark times and depression because u long to be a mother & are unable to give ur partner a child & parents a grandchild... fertility treatments are well vetted, you don't just get them for the sake of it.
Genuinely can't believe people are against this.

On the subject of IVF - unless you have faced fertility problems, you can't possibly imagine the pain of involuntary childlessness . It creates huge mental health problems. Not funding IVF is always a suggestion put forward by people who conceived easily. Selfish. I could say we shouldn't fund smoking related illnesses because I don't smoke, but I wouldn't say that because I'm not selfish.

I think IVF should be funded still as it can be used to prevent genetic diseases which end up having a higher cost to the NHS if not prevented. The problem with questions like this is that there are lots of factors to everything which is offered, it’s quite tough to decide when to stop.