Novel way to curb Smoking Public Health Cost

Hoo boy, where to start with the UK's healthcare system?

It's underfunded. The conservative government would much prefer a US-style model.
It's understaffed. Until Brexit happened, a big proportion of NHS staff came from other EU countries. After Brexit, many left:

Across Europe, there are a lot of countries which provide a far better universal healthcare experience than the UK (and a few that are worse). You're not gonna get instant treatment, but you (generally) won't be left waiting if you've got a life-threatening problem. You also won't be bankrupted by your medical bills.

And of course, nobody's forced to use the public healthcare system. If you want to pay for faster access to care or better doctors, you can do that too. Best of both worlds...

C'mon, are those the best articles you could find?

The Gatestone Institute is a far-right think-tank with 'mixed' factual reporting: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/gatestone-institute/

Their piece is basically a rant about "woke" idealogy and immigrants. lol.

American Thinker is another far-right source with low factual reporting: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-thinker/

American Thinker's claim that Europe only has universal healthcare because the US freed up money they would have had to otherwise spend on defense is a flat-out lie

 

Except they supplied reasoning and sources on why those sources were questionable.

 

Right-wing dog-whistle websites masquerading as news? You can click on the links in my previous post to see how objective and trustworthy they are. If you're stupid enough to believe what you read on "American Thinker" I genuinely feel sorry for you. Step out of your bubble every once in a while...

Have a blessed day!

 

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an American website founded in 2015 by editor Dave M. Van Zandt.[1] It uses a 0–10 scale to rate sites on two areas: bias and factual accuracy. It has been criticised for its methodology and accuracy.[2]

Media Bias Fact Check: Incompetent or Dishonest? - Just Facts Daily
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute
Interesting.....

Prohibitions are easily implemented in certain settings:
Nancy Regan: "Just say no"
Carrie Nation: "Gimme that hatchet!"
My Kindergartener Teacher: "No Gum in class!"

However (comma!) prohibitions usually result people running headlong into the laws of unintended consequences, and the law of supply and demand.
Americans in particular are spectacularly thick-headed when it comes to those laws.
(and desks in gum-free classes are about as "gum-free" and Gun-free zones are "free" from guns.)

Example:

narcotraficante
Noun:
narcotraficante m or f (plural narcotraficantes)

1. drug trafficker
2. drug baron, drug lord capo

Related terms

• camello

 

Okay, took a look at the articles.

American Thinker
Neither AT nor the Express state what cancer the patient had. That's right, had. Well, that it is in remission or cured is a guess on my part, but if this wait was about treatment or the patient being untreated, neither article would have left that fact out. The AT leads the reader to believe the 3 year wait was from diagnosis. While the E uses cancer-battling to describe the patient in the first line, the headline used battled, and further into the article, it states the appointment is for a check up.

The whole battling bit has me thinking he has already been treated for the cancer, not just recently diagnosed with it. Maybe 3 years for a check up is too long, but without knowing what cancer, nor stage it is currently in, we can't make a judgement. The other examples in the article are even more vague on details. The E even uses finger quotes on the urgent; is that a quote or sarcasm?

The AT article ends with a call to let the free market run healthcare, and it doesn't consider US insurance free market.

Gatestone
I found the heavy use of finger quotes distraction, and they weren't for quoting a source. Which is why this was more of a look than read for me. If this had been a tweet, the hashtags would far exceed the length of the post. It wasn't trying to not appear as a biased opinion piece. Wasn't clear if it was talking about the UK or US. It brings up immigration, and how hate crime laws are criminalization of speech, among others, without much on how they relate to the topic.

Despite being written recently, neither article brought up the employment issue the UK currently has for healthcare workers, notably nurses. Mainly this seems to be because of Brexit. If another reason, say the UK's system resulted in too low wages to attract talent, I think it would have been mentioned.

 

Is he still trying to persuade everyone he knows what he's talking about? I put him on the 'Ignore' list a couple days ago.

 

More BC patients being sent south of the border, this time for radiation treatments for cancer:

KOMO: British Columbia begins to send cancer patients to Bellingham for treatment
CBC: Some B.C. cancer patients to be offered radiation treatments in Bellingham, Wash.

“Let's look at the facts," Dix said. "Infant mortality, way better. Life expectancy, way better. Health inequality, way better. Response to COVID 19? Way better. Right? I mean, dramatically better.

"At every level of care, the Canadian system does better than the American system. It's not ideal. There’s criticism, right, of this action. But this is an action of seeing an opportunity to reduce the wait time people see, and taking advantage of that, because we're all in the same boat.”

If Dix had said "most" he'd have been right. But "every" contradicts his agency's action in this case.

 

Since you've revived this thread.....

I'll bring it back to smoking and vaping.

You know when you're listening to the radio and there's an absolute Wth moment?

When I was driving yesterday, I was listening to British radio, and this story came up. It's about a proposed change to British law (I assume just English and Welsh, as Scottish law is separate).

Vaping: Government plans under-age crackdown - BBC News
A loophole allowing retailers to give free vape samples to children is set to be closed under government plans to curb their use among young people.
....
Under the law, only the sale of nicotine products to people under 18 is banned - but some companies are giving away free samples.

In the past year, thousands of children in the UK were given a free vape, according to data from Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).
​

Like I said, Wth? It's only illegal for shops to sell vapes to kids, but it's fine for them to give vapes to kids?

Of course this is not a thing in Australia. Some kids do vape, but selling or giving vapes to kids is wildly illegal. My kids were in the car with me, and they were as shocked as I was.

 

Oooh, the software now changes what I wrote - W T F - to "Wth".

Good grief.

 

What the hell is in the same spirit. The software could have gone nonsensical, or the visual equivalent of using the censor beep at higher volume in the middle of a song.

 

Terms of Service and Rules

 

Indeed.

But what I originally posted is no longer seen as sweary in most English-speaking countries; it's seen as the acceptable alternative to swearing, and is in common parlance in mainstream media, including in the news.

Is that not the case in the US?

 

More proof that the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on stupid legislators. At least ours covered giving as well as selling.

During my only week in England, at the tail end of the past Century, we were visiting many tourist attractions at the same time a great many school groups were taking field trips to the same venues. I was astounded by how many of the high school students were smoking. At least they were smoking just outdoors, not indoors. It turned out that the legal age to smoke there was just 16. The legal age in much of the U.S. then was 18, which includes some high school students, but they would not be smoking during such field trips. A few states may have already moved up to 21.

Since then, England has raised its smoking age to 18. The U.S., to 21 everywhere. Not that the materials are any harder to obtain here than alcohol. Or now, fentanyl.

 

I'm not sure it is.

W - T - F, much as - as I said in my reply to @fuzzy1 - it isn't sweary any more where I live, expresses a degree of extreme surprise that Wth really doesn't.

Wth says "I am mildly surprised, and I live in the 1950s". W - T - F says "Good grief! I am genuinely shocked." And that is a lot closer to what I thought when I heard on the radio that it was still legal in Britain to give kids free vapes.

 

That is an eye- and ear-of-the-beholder thing. It varies quite strongly among social circles. Don't presume it to be acceptable everywhere, especially among older people. Most broadcast news that I see and hear, still avoids it.

 

Yeah, you'd have thought that it was a no-brainer. But then you'd look at Britain's legislators and see that something being a no-brainer doesn't mean the government will be able to work it out.

Yes. Whenever we go to visit my parents, my kids are shocked at the level of smoking and vaping in Britain. (I'd say how they expressed their shock, but the software nanny would slap me.) Not just among kids - among adults too. It is astonishing how much people smoke and vape there. Both are really quite unusual here.

There is a vaping problem with teens in Australia: my kids said they can often smell vape steam in the school toilets. But it's nothing to what's going on in Britain. And we're changing our legislation: as I think you know, Australia has long been a leader in smoking regulation, but the regulation didn't keep up with vaping. We're doing that now, which I'm pleased about.

....which brings us back to the start of the thread. New Zealand's approach of raising the smoking age every year is, I think, a very good one.