Healthcare for all! Unless you’re fat

This article was published in Spiked Online 3 March 2011

It is not the role of the state to prevent people from having operations on the basis of their lifestyles.

A few years ago, the National Health Service (NHS) first considered refusing to treat obese people for lifestyle-related illnesses. In the same vein, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the NHS’s guidance body, produced advice that raised the prospect of heavy smokers and obese people being refused healthcare. But that will never happen, many said.

Well, it already has. Discriminatory healthcare is the new reality.

An NHS health trust now proposes to stop sending obese people and smokers for certain operations. NHS North Yorkshire and York is planning to stop patients who smoke, and those with a body mass index of more than 35, from having routine hip and knee surgeries because their unhealthy lifestyles allegedly lower the chance of the operations’ ‘success’.