Socialized Healthcare Leads to Mass Rejection of Obese Patients in UK

Yes, folks, as hard as it is to fathom, socialized medicine actually leads to less service for certain groups of people deemed a lower priority – in this case, the overweight.

According to The Telegraph:

Obese people will be routinely refused operations across the NHS, health service bosses have warned, after one authority said it would limit procedures on an unprecedented scale.

Hospital leaders in North Yorkshire said that patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above – as well as smokers – will be barred from most surgery for up to a year amid increasingly desperate measures to plug a funding black hole. The restrictions will apply to standard hip and knee operations.

The decision, described by the Royal College of Surgeons as the “most severe the modern NHS has ever seen”, led to warnings that other trusts will soon be forced to follow suit and rationing will become the norm if the current funding crisis continues.

Why is this? Because as the economically literate are fully aware, funding has to come from somewhere, and if resources run thin, publicly funded services will begin to run less efficiently. It’s simple – human income is a limited resource, and when it is involuntarily taken to fund far too many services at once (and when privatized iterations can work much better), the everyday people suffer.

But tell that to those already in favor of it. The response is often one of denial and agitation.