Originally Posted by adil_909

there is a huge piece of the article you guys have missed. this article is not suggesting that smokers and fat people receive no medical care, it is just referring to non-emergent treatment. for example, a female smoker comes in and says "doc i want to get a breast implant". the doc would say "fine, first quit smoking and then come back to me". i think there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, in fact, i think it is an admirable way to tackle the menace of obesity and tobacco use in todays society. nobody is denying anyone EMERGENT medical care, which is the big take away point from this story, this is relating to elective treatment. its not like if you have pneumonia and you're fat then the doctors won't give you antibiotics. that's not the point these doctors are trying to make. it's about non-emergency treatment, and how to make a large societal impact. also, keep in mind that smoking increases your risk of post-operative complications such as blood clots by a significant percentage, and obesity increases your risk of intra-operative complications significantly. the higher your % of body fat the more the anesthestic drugs get absorbed into the fat and can cause problems in putting the patient to sleep and waking them up. also the surgeries themselves are extremely challenging in obese people as to even find the structure you are looking for, you have to spend so much time clearing the fat first. and chances are that if you are that obese, you have diabetes and heart disease as well, which themselves cause tremendous complications.

overall i think this is an interesting concept, and certainly not one that violates the hippocratic oath in any way. all doctors ration care, the only place that is legally prohibited from doing so are emergency rooms which this article is not discussing. but we can all agree that obesity and smoking are huge problems in all societies right now, and something has to be done to target this issue. obesity is a harder thing to solve, but i'm very interested in the impact this has on smoking. it's hard to take your BMI from 40 --> 30, but it's not hard to stop smoking if you really put your mind to it. i think this law would help reduce tobacco use in the UK substantially, and anything that accomplishes that is perfectly fine by me!