Quote:
Originally Posted by Carth
To be fair, we the public are made well aware of the health problems that can result from being overweight . . and smoking . . and excessive alcohol
|
True but this pandemic shows the degree to which an individual's health is of concern to wider society and the state. The unhealthier the population as a whole is the greater burden on the NHS and the more it costs us in terms of capacity of that service and the cost to provide it.
We're still going to have to depend on personal responsibility but the Government doing what it can to encourage that and help people can't hurt.
I was thinking the other day in how smoking is a known risk factor, how we've had a decade of aggressive government intervention to slower the rates of smoking and how many lives may have been saved as a result.
If we see a similar success to that in obesity then in a decade's time we'll have fewer rates of people being admitted in in-patient and out-patient care.