GP Phillip Lee warns the soaring cost of 'lifestyle' diseases like obesity could bankrupt the NHS
People who eat doughnuts for breakfast should pay for prescriptions if they develop diabetes, a Tory MP said yesterday.
Phillip Lee, who is also a practising GP, warned the soaring cost of obesity and other lifestyle diseases will bankrupt the NHS unless people take more responsibility for their own health.
Calling for charges to be brought in, the MP for Bracknell said: ‘If you want to have doughnuts for breakfast, fine, but there is a cost implication. We need to match actions to consequences – at the moment that does not happen.’
Tory MP and GP Phillip Lee said most patients these days were suffering from lifestyle-related illnesses that could bankrupt the NHS
Dr Lee also warned that members of the ‘baby boomer’ generation were less ‘stoical’ than their parents – with potentially disastrous consequences for the finances of the NHS. He said there a ‘stark difference’ between the way in which those in their eighties dealt with pain, compared to those in their late sixties and early seventies.
Dr Lee said the majority of patients he saw were now suffering from illnesses caused by their lifestyles, or complaining of conditions that their forebears would have suffered in silence.
He suggested ministers should study the system used in Denmark where individuals are allocated a ‘modest’ annual drugs budget, after which they are expected to pay for their own prescriptions.
And he said charging people for the cost of their prescriptions would encourage them to take more responsibility for their own health.
‘If you want to have doughnuts for breakfast, fine, but there is a cost implication down the line,’ he said.
‘We need to match actions to consequences – at the moment that does not happen in this country.’
Dr Lee said people had to take more responsibility for their own health
Politicians have traditionally fought shy of telling people to take responsibility for their own health, because of fears of a public backlash.
‘It probably can limp on for the rest of this decade but the reality is the pressures coming from the baby boomer generation and their expectations of health care, their perceptions of pain and suffering is profoundly different to their stoic parents who survived the war."
Please read more at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238780/People-eat-doughnuts-breakfast-charged-prescriptions-says-Tory-MP.html
Written By JASON GROVES via @MailOnline
