Should the NHS pay for treatment for Lung Cancer

[Zak33]

ASo stop looking for scapegoats and if you want better services, pay for them.

how? smoke?

[Lee H]

If Smoking pays such excellent rates of tax INTO the NHS coffers (I know the tax is high..not arguing that) then why is it so bad?

The reason my friend is simple, after years of bad management in the 80-90's the NHS is actually getting back on track and will soon be the flagship healthcare system that was supposed to be implemented when the NHS was created. Too many managers are in the NHS - hell I bet they have a buscuit for brew times manager as everytime I was walking round hospital and the staff wore ID badges ... most of them say x manager, and y manager so I bet 1/2 the savings have come from wiping these out and rolling the two jobs together to create an xy manager ( lol its like biology class with these X and Y )

[nichomach]

Smoking causes 120,000 deaths and costs the NHS £1.7bn per year

OK, so we know the costs, and how much smokers pay extra. So the public purse is over £6.3bn to the good every year from smokers. So get off it, Zak. You wanted me to show you profit? Is that enough?

[Zak33]

yes...thats enough.

thanks

good one

[joshwa]

(figures from working in the NHS): there are over 300 deaths per day due to smoking related illnesses, 2* deaths per day due to passive smoking - surely the issue is why are we letting smokers kill other people?

* this is estimated at 9 per day by some people

and why do smokers complain about the Liverpool public smoking ban when smokers are responsible for the deaths of 2 non-smoking people a day?!?

"Smoking is the leading cause of avoidable ill health and early death. In the UK tobacco kills about 120,000 people each year accounting for around 20% of all deaths. It causes about 80% of all lung cancer deaths and around 30% of all cancer deaths."

http://www.lhps.org.uk/hp_smokprev.html

"over 17,000 under-5s are hospitalised as a result of their parents' smoking each year" http://www.ash.org.uk/

[joshwa]

Considering the governments income from smoking - they don't seem to spend much on anti-smoking education... http://www.ash.org.uk/

· The UK government earned £8,055 million in revenue from tobacco duty excluding VAT in the financial year 2002-03.
· The Government currently spends around £30m on anti-smoking education campaigns. A further £41m is spent on measures to help people stop smoking.

[petrefax]

but what if all the people who smoked did actually give up....what would they do with their time?? they'd probably take up sport & add to the already over-populated queues for orthapaedic surgery instead of being in the lung transplant queue

[Moby-Dick]

Considering the governments income from smoking - they don't seem to spend much on anti-smoking education... http://www.ash.org.uk/

· The UK government earned £8,055 million in revenue from tobacco duty excluding VAT in the financial year 2002-03.
· The Government currently spends around £30m on anti-smoking education campaigns. A further £41m is spent on measures to help people stop smoking.

of course not - why would they want to loose such a lucrative source of income ?

I dont approve of the smoking bans because its one more "nanny state" action designed to cut off our liberties one thing at a time.

If a landlord wished to run a non smoking pub then so be it - its his choice !

[Moby-Dick]

cars are probably responsible for a lot more than 2 non driving people a day's death - lets ban driving as well.



WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN! !!!!!!

all this non smoking talk really makes me want one.....back in a bit

[Swafe]

its bad for you ! dont do it

[ajbrun]

Well, I have though that they'd make a compromise, and I know they do this. If someone wants treatment for something, and are told to stop smoking, otherwise the treatment will be useless or even harmful, then they're not allowed the treatment. It's just a waste of money and possible too risky.

[Kumagoro]

The tax would be generated else where, as money for fags would be spent on other things so its not like £8 billion in tax just disappears...

Also how do you know the info that smokers only cost 1.5 billion is true many smoking companies create there own studies etc. You cant unfortunatly trust everything you read alledged scientific study or not.

[G4Z]

Well, I used to work in the NHS as an IT tech, I used to visit all the wards as they all had PC's. I can tell you now just from what I seen in our 3 large hospitals that the one demographic that costs the NHS the most is not smoking, its old people.

Zak, based on your logic should we be refusing people over 60 access to the NHS seeing as they no longer pay any tax? After all they cost us a fortune.

Unfortunately there are more and more old people as the "baby boomers" retire, I think that smoking is a pretty small issue compared to that time bomb.

Personally I think a start would be voluntary euthenasia as I have at least one relative with no quality of life who would be put down if he was a dog (probably, im not a doctor or a vet or anything mind...). I know myself I wont wanna keep going after my body claps out. I read an interesting statistic that on average the last 6 weeks of your life costs more in healthcare than the rest of your life.

might have gone off on a tangent there...

[nichomach]

The tax would be generated else where, as money for fags would be spent on other things so its not like £8 billion in tax just disappears...

Also how do you know the info that smokers only cost 1.5 billion is true many smoking companies create there own studies etc. You cant unfortunatly trust everything you read alledged scientific study or not.

1.7bn and I was going on the NHS's own figures, OK? So it's not exactly funded by Benson & Hedges.

And unless the money gets spent on something else which attracts over 40% duty (in addition to 17.5% VAT) then more than £7bn of that £8bn tax revenue will, I'm afraid, just disappear.

[Nox]

im with daniel_owen on this one - smokers pay an assload in tax, that should be spent fixing them up after. My dad was saying hes actually more likely to die from something like pneumonia or flu (hes a heavy smoker) than lung cancer at the moment - his lungs just would not be able to cope with a bad dose of either of those. Not sure how accurate that is statistically, but he lives in the country and an ambulance would have to negotiate about 45 minutes of cow crap should they pack up! I'm a non smoker btw, though probably take my fair share of passive smoking thuough myself and girlfriend have just switched our local to a non-smoking pub.

Nox

[Iain]

The argument was should the NHS pay for treatment for lung cancer for smokers and I still stand by my opinion that no they shouldn't. If someone is stupid enough to smoke and contribute to the coffers of government taxation then that's their decision. The money spent treating them could be spent far more productively in other areas of the country such as public transport, education, crime prevention and so on rather than treating someone who is on a path to suicide. And I'm quite sure that the government figures only relate to the treatment of the individual with the smoking related disease, they won't account for the therapy required for the bereaved, support care because the primary provider in the home died of a smoking related illness and all the other knock-on effects. Don't think for one minute that the 6.3bn that the government seems to profit is anything like that amount if you were to analyse the total impact.

It's also important to think of the non-lethal aspects such as infertility. The lack of children in the UK will be a huge issue in the next 20 years or so as there will be less and less working people to pay for the ever-increasing elderly population. Smoking is directly related to infertility and miscarriages. But then that's another argument