Health “Responsibility”

Universal health care: It’s free! It’s easy! It’s what the government wants to do for you, right!

Well, if you listen to most of the liberal health care advocates, that’s what you’ll hear.  Problem is, in places where it’s actually been implemented, it’s not true.   See today’s UK Telegraph for Britain’s National Health Service Minister explaining to residents that they have "responsibilities:"

Despite the NHS commitment to provide free universal care, it is already common for doctors to set conditions on patients seeking treatment.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence already considers so-called self-induced illnesses in setting the criteria that determine which patients should qualify for new or expensive health treatments.

And this year Leicester City Primary Care Trust was given Government approval to ask smokers to quit before they are given places on waiting lists for operations such as hip replacements and heart surgery.

Obese people also face more conditions from doctors who say being very overweight unnecessarily complicates many procedures.

For example, fertility doctors have argued that very obese women should be denied access to IVF treatment.

This is one of the huge problems with government health care that consistently goes unnoticed: As soon as the public is responsible for paying for your health, the government gets to tell you how to live.  When you let others take responsibility for paying for your care, you naturally give up a certain amount of agency.

What’s hilarious, though, if also kind of sad, is that this is being portrayed as some sort of feint toward individual responsibility:

“We will describe how we will achieve our shared ambition of an NHS which is more personal and responsive to individual needs,” the Prime Minister writes.

“Personalised not just because patients can get the treatment that they need when and where they want, but because from an early stage we are all given the information and advice to take greater responsibility for our own health.”

If you want people to take responsibility for their health, how about taking them off the government health rolls and letting them?