UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
My dad was a doctor for decades, working in oncology, and he was noticing that NHS budgets were struggling with so many people not dying of smoking related diseases.
If people live longer then they end up developing more complex diseases and degenerative conditions which are even more expensive for the NHS; requiring round the clock care, etc.
If imagine your dad would have wanted people to live longer healthier lives due to not smoking and being fitter rather than longer unhealthy lives with complications at a later age due to smoking.
Or did he just want people to die younger to reduce the burdon on the NHS budget? Something tells me that's not what he would have wanted 😅.
It would be nihilistic to encourage smoking just because it saved the NHS money. He was just pointing out that there was an irony that people who died younger ended up taking less out of the NHS than those who lived longer, healthier lives.
Edit: I guess there are other examples of paradox like situations in public policy too. For example it is good for the individual if they save money but bad for the economy as a whole. Having too many savers can lead to a situation like Japan where people immediately save any economic stimulus they are given, so it doesn't stimulate the wider economy.