An example of the sheer vileness of the right wing these days [View all]

[LeftishBrit]

This is an article by Cristina Odone in the Torygraph. She starts out with the valid issue that elderly people often don't get the best from the NHS - which I think is partly due to ageist prejudices, but to a large extent simply to the fact that medical administration and the training of doctors and nurses all stem from a time when far fewer people lived to be very old, and haven't caught up with modern realities.

But then she goes on to say that one should instead reduce services to the 'undeserving'.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100146838/why-should-fat-people-take-precedence-over-the-elderly-in-the-nhs/

'There are plenty of conditions, though, that are the direct result of bad habits, poor diet, and the wrong choices. These conditions range from obesity and diabetes to smoking-related diseases like emphesema. If a 20-stone, 30-something woman comes into hospital with a bad diabetic attack, does she deserve to be at the front of the queue or the back? She has chosen to stuff her face with Mars bars and Coke, and is now suffering the consequences of her choice. She cannot claim ignorance of the dangers of her diet: the Government has carpet-bombed us with health advice, from schools to GP practices. Class no longer regulates access to healthy living: everyone who can watch the telly, let alone read the magazines, knows that a high-fat diet will make you look bad and feel worse.

Does the obese 30-something lay claim to NHS services and a hospital bed when this means thousands of others will have to do without?

The septuagenarian who develops breast cancer has done nothing wrong – except grow old. The NHS has to consider that there are deserving cases and undeserving ones. Age should not be a barrier to optimum care; but bad habits should be.'

I just find this sort of stuff incredibly vicious. There is a recent tendency to be incredibly nasty to and about the chronically sick and disabled - which mostly still at least pays lipservice to the idea that deservingness is based on medical needs, not moral virtue as judged by someone else, and that it is malingerers, rather than the genuinely ill, who are their targets (pull the other one, but at least it's what they claim). But this is naked blaming-the-victim; judging people by their moral 'deservingness', not the genuineness of their needs. Is this what we should expect in the future from a semi-privatized health service?

And of course ultimately it's The Lower Classes who most need to be assessed for their deservingness! I doubt that Cristina Odone would demand that Eric Pickles, to give just one obvious example, should lose weight before he has the right to medical care. The reader 'steffanjohn' summed up a lot of her attitude:

'It's not 'hidden decision making by health managers and medics'.

The current principle is based on primarily on medical need, with cost-to-life-extension a secondary consideration on the very expensive treatments.

What Odone is advocating is that instead of basing it on medical need, we should also judge it according to a moral judgement too.

Obese people pay their taxes, and from a statistical basis it's clear that healthier people are more of a 'burden' on health services overall.

Underneath all this really is a disgust at obese people - and underneath that is a disgust at working class people.

Why else did Odone refer to 'magazines' (not newspapers), 'mars bars and Coke' (as opposed to cheese and wine) and 'telly' instead of television?

Why else is the article adorned with a picture of two women of the 'lower orders' rather than professionals, or just something non-descript class-wise?

It's because it's proles she doesn't like'