"or countering the effects of people's own stupidity (eg. anything related to smoking"
Actually the nhs would suffer terribly if people didnt smoke
the taxes raise a huge amount of money
But that money doesn't go into the NHS, anyways......if you want to get onto the smoking debate, you have to factor in the other costs; loss of work hours during smoking brakes (estimated as costing £1,000 per smoker per year in a Canadian study), or the cost of accidents involving smoking (house fires in particular, also public area fires; smoking caused an est. 5,400 fires in 1996 with over 1000 deaths), or the impacts of passive smoking on family or workers. In any case, ciggy tax is not to fund NHS treatment but to provide a) a deterrent and b) a 'guilt free' income to the government.
You could say 'ah, but if that tax didn't get into the Treasury then the money would need to come from somwhere' - which is fair, but then again we piss away vast sums of money on things like pointless wars or botched government IT schemes anyways.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16874285/site/newsweek/
Go tell that little boy that not paying a few taxes are more important than his life. I'm sure he'll understand.
Read the article rather than just quote a sob story to paint me as a heartless neoconservative, please.
But when his son Thomas, born with severe hemophilia, developed a resistance to treatment at age 1, Wilkes’s claims soared; his company’s insurance provider, Wilkes says, soon began hiking premiums 40 to 55 percent each year, and introduced a lifetime cap of $1 million for all employees and their families—including Thomas. Soon, Wilkes says, no other insurance companies would offer to cover the company.
The problem is with the insurance companies jacking up the prices, not with people not being able to afford health care in the first place. The man making $100,000 a year could apparently afford the health care plan before, but not after the insurance companies start raising prices.
I think you're highlighting the symptom, not the disease (wahey! Appropriate metaphor
*cough*) here; isn't this just evidence that privatised healthcare is so overpriced that people are forced to rely on, in effect, others (namely, those who pay health insurance but never claim)? What's different between that and taxing, beyond the exclusion of low wage earners from access to healthcare?
I mean, the way I see it is that the UK system charges everyone a little (more or less proportionately) for universal access to an imperfect but crucially freely and fairly available service (with the option to go private should they wish to pay a premium, of course). Whereas the US system forces everyone into a situation where your ability to be treated is determined by how much money you have, and how generous other people are feeling - and whilst that system may allow provision through greater funding (profit), it's one where the cost
in human suffering is far too high for my stomach.
EDIT; as an aside, here's a story from 2004 (
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0505/p02s01-uspo.html) which determined that - despite the average American paying twice as much as for public healthcare - the Us wasn't universally better than any of 4 countries (including Canada and Australia; the other 2 countries aren't named)
Additionally, the Us apparently has lower life expectancy than the UK (or indeed Cuba and 27 other countries) based on a UNDP Human Development Report (2004).
