Jan 08 2010
NHS Costs – a more radical view
According to the London Evening Standard there are around 700,000 sufferers of dementia in the UK being looked after by friends and relatives. This saves the state about £6bn annually. However, the number of people with dementia is expected to rise to 1.7 million by 2050 which would cost someone around £10bn annually. At the same time it is expected that family members will become less able to support elderly relatives and the shortfall will have to be taken up by the NHS.
Now, it costs £1.7bn per year to treat smokers, £3bn to treat alcohol-related diseases and a whopping £6.2bn to treat the obese (source: NHS). All three have avoidable problems, purely down to lifestyle. However, all three typically do not suffer from dementia as they usually die before it sets in!
So, there’s your solution, make tobacco, alcohol and fast food as cheap as possible and encourage people to consume in quantity; offer bare-minimum treatment such as pain-killers to people with self-inflicted illnesses and thus save the NHS a massive £20bn which is half its annual budget!
Yet some idiot wants to put the price of alcohol up 
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