To think we shouldn't be funding this on the NHS?

[AgileJadeDog]

I recently had my first stay in hospital due to a respiratory issue and I kid you not, every other person in the bay smoked+had a smoking related disease.

I have no idea if this is typical in other specialties/hospitals but it really hit me how much gets spent on completely self inflicted stuff. AIBU to think we shouldn't be funding stuff like this?

I know! Think how much childhood accidents cost the NHS!

Of course yabu.

I see people still smoking on the grounds!

Maybe we shouldn't provide NHS care to those who could afford to go private...? People who paid less tax than you had to pay towards your care. How selfish of you when you could have allowed the NHS to use those funds to care for sick children who really need the help. (Sarcasm, in case it isn't obvious - I think the NHS should be for everybody).

You're oversimplifying a complex issue and coming off as judgemental and unpleasant. Mental health issues can lead to substance abuse, self harm, suicide attempts. How do you decide whether 'self inflicted' conditions are a symptom of something that was in no way self inflicted? How do you prove or disprove that someone has always used sunscreen, has never had alcohol or smoked at some point in the past? How much would it cost to administer a scheme that attempts to police access to healthcare like this?

Well I kinda hope this will decrease.
I'm mid fifties and in my youth and really up to my 30s everyone smoked. I couldn't due to asthma.
Now I see hardly any 30s and below smoking ( well not tobacco!).
Plenty of hard drinking though.
British American tobacco thrive as they went into tapes instead

That's understandable

exactly, and can you prove that your sunscreen was in date, and that you applied it everyday? Sorry, you went outside. No treatment for you...

Don't be so daft. Most healthcare required is self-inflicted in some way, including childbirth.

Wow - did you base your whole thread on your psychic abilities?

I know what you mean about smoking, but then I think of one of my parents who started smoking in the 60’s and although he stopped smoking 20 years ago, now has a chronic lung condition. At the time he started, the issues around smoking weren’t as well known and there was no warning/prevention schemes like there are now.

I really don’t understand how those who are 40 and under who chose to start smoking, or youngsters who are starting now to vape. The consequences have been well publicised.

Yeah and the lazy work shy sods don't even contribute in taxes!!!

I have a feeling this thread will be zapped.

Your treatment for this one incident would cost way more than £80k if you were to pay for it. People genuinely have no idea how much the actual cost of treatment is.

Also I am loving the idea that only people with healthy lifestyles pay taxes. As though none of those people in the ward you were on also pay £80k in taxes. My father is a smoker and also was a net contributor before retirement. I am not going to be telling him he has no right to treatment if he needs it, especially since he also has never been in hospital and is now in his seventies. He has paid more in in his lifetime probably than you have, plus the extra in duty on cigarettes.

If you’re outraged by this then I dread to think what you think about all people who attend A&E with objects in their bums 🤣.

Well, they're only there because they fell off the toilet so we should treat them. After all that could happen to any of us. 😛

I’m happy for the nhs to help smokers however the cost should be financed solely through taxes on cigarettes, even if it makes them stupidly expensive

I'm 60. Back in my teen years of the 80s, it was well known that smoking was dangerous and it was already strongly discouraged. Relatively few people smoked. So I think you've got your timings a bit wrong. Yes, people smoked in planes in the 80s, but they were in a separate smoking section at the back of the plane - just the back few rows - the majority were in the non smoking area in the middle and front. It was 1971 when warnings were legally required to be put on cigarette packets! I think you need to go back to the 60s as being the last decade where smoking was more common place, acceptable and people genuinely didn't know the risks.

This

I was recently in hospital (after cancer surgery). Of the other folks on the ward, 2 were there on thiamine therapy for alcohol withdrawal - one of those had jumped off a building trying to kill himself (and survived), not sure why the other was there, possibly a fall or neurological issue but related to alcohol. Another one stabbed herself in the stomach 😳 because she stopped her psychiatric meds, I guess you could call that self-inflicted too.

The other guy had a tracheotomy so couldn’t talk, so no idea what led to that. But most people are in hospital because of something self-inflicted. Even I was there for treatment for cancer probably caused by negligence by my parents in childhood, so while not self-inflicted, it was certainly preventable if they’d been more responsible parents.

@AgileJadeDog is clearly not going to be interested in this but for others who may want to understand health inequalities and the lack of real choice for people, the kings fund is a good place to start https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/health-inequalities-nutshell

Most health related behaviours are not a choice. It’s why people in Scarborough will die sooner than people in South Cambridgeshire. It’s why those with learning difficulties will die before those without. It’s why lung disease disproportionately affects people who were born into poverty.

It’s why healthcare should remain free. No one chooses the decisions that lead to illness. Society places them in that position. Some of us can’t understand the lack of choice as we don’t live in those houses and we don’t live or see those lives. Look harder to see it.

Smoking is not permitted on hospital grounds anywhere in the UK. @AgileJadeDog where was this hospital?

I believe some of them were doing the housework in the nude and fell on an item..

Right, so on that basis let’s not treat smokers but equally the money cigarettes generate shouldn’t go into the NHS either. Smokers can have that money go directly into their own healthcare instead.

It would be grossly unfair for them to be paying significantly more into the system than you (cigarettes are very, heavily taxed), you get treatment but they cannot.

Trouble is that so many people buy duty free cigarettes, so they're not paying duty/tax to the UK government. That's whether they buy them abroad and bring them back after travelling, or more commonly, buying them from dodgy shops and pubs from under the counter (the good old black economy!).

Obviously you have to treat everyone, that's the point.

But when you're throwing more than 3 times the total water companies dividends since privatisation a year at the NHS, isn't it time we had a long look at ourselves?

How many times do you go to hospital and see someone wheeling their drip outside for a cigarette? Or massively morbidly obese people shovelling more crap in?

Unless you're willing to stump up even more tax (forget all this fair share for others crap, it's not how reality works in a global economy, wealth is mobile) then we need to stop taking the piss.

I'm really sorry, but I can't imagine this level of critical thinking skills returns an £80k tax pay packet. Unless you're a male footballer I guess or similar.