Good grief, this is ridiculous

We're not sure that people understand what they're letting themselves in for here:

The vast majority of people believe alcohol abusers should pay for their own treatment rather than get it free on the NHS, a survey has found. More than half said the NHS should not fund treatment if the illness was a consequence of smoking and patients should be forced to pay for it themselves. The report questioned 4,000 UK adults about the cost of common procedures in the UK and whether it should be publicly funded.

Boozers, smokers and fatties save the NHS money: the costs of treating these various diseases unto death are lower than the lifetime costs of treating people who succumb to other diseases or even just old age. So the basic concept is wrong in itself.

However, there's another problem here. Which is that the health establishment, or at least the majority of the public health bit of it, is convinced that all diseases are caused by someone "doing something". In fact, if you tot up all the numbers, the people who have got cancer, or diabetes, or heart disease, from sugar, salt, smoking, boozing and donuts you end up with more people than there are people actually ill.

Meaning that if this principle were taken seriously, that you don't get NHS treatment for something you've done to yourself, there would be no free NHS treatment at all. Which would be fine for the bureaucracy of course, nirvana in fact: £120 billion a year without having to do anything. But it's not really the point of having an NHS, is it?