The Envy of the World

NHS Negligence Bill Tops £1bn a year

This is the headline in today's Independent on Sunday. A sorry financial aggregation of human unhappiness caused by the NHS, and a lamentable waste of our money.

This could be compared with other National Health Services across the world, except for some reason the rest of the world doesn't have one, despite smug conventional wisdom telling us that they all envy ours.

Unless...

Who all the pies?

Fatties are causing problems:

Figures released to the Conservatives under the Freedom of Information Act show that fire services were called out almost every day of the last five years to assist in lifting obese patients. In 1826 days there were 1784 call outs, and more than three quarters of the incidents involved NHS patients.

On one occasion the fire fighters were called to help move a patient from one hospital bed to another.

Fire trucks were also needed to help lift patients from their homes, from baths in which they had become stuck, and from upstairs parts of their houses.

Heh. Hehehehe. Okay, it's childish, but there's something deliciously, wickedly funny about actual fire engines being needed to assist the tubby.

In total the call outs cost fire authorities across the country £4 million over five years.

That's less funny. But luckily I have a simple solution: make the fat fuckers pay themselves. They can obviously afford industrial quantities of cake, chips and cheeseburgers so they can't be that skint.

But wait, there's a greater idiocy on its way...

Mike Penning, the shadow health minister, said: "As a former firefighter, I am concerned at these figures. They show the severe strain that the growing obesity epidemic is putting our emergency services under.

"Labour's complacent attitude to tackling obesity has meant that years have been wasted in our bid to deal with this growing problem. We urgently need action now, but unfortunately this Government's record has been one of obesity targets missed and scrapped, budgets for information campaigns being raided, and dithering over food labelling.

"It is about time that the Labour Government woke up and started to take obesity seriously."

Oh for God's sake. I hate this Government as much as anyone, but it's not their fault stupid people gorge themselves silly on chocolate bars and lard butties. It's individual responsibility - to which, incidentally, I am happy to extend to the NHS charging porkers for treating their self-inflicted condition.

And no, taxing Mars Bars won't work because you won't get a new generation of sleek beautiful people, you'll just get slightly poorer lardbuckets while the rest of us suffer.