NHS Meltdown: Paying Weight Watchers but Rationing Care

The NHS disarray continues. In the scheme of things—with people in the UK unable to get good pain control and hospitals having receptionists examine patients—this is small. But it is symbolic of what happens in socialized systems. From the story:

The Health Service has paid out more than £3 million to the two biggest slimming firms in the country, Weight Watchers and Slimming World, for providing classes to overweight people referred to them by GPs. Since 2006, primary care trusts have bought vouchers entitling more than 70,000 people to free slimming classes.

New NHS fat camp for obese families in Rotherham. While the companies were paid upfront, less than 60 per cent of those who were referred by their GP stuck with the 12-week course, which cost £65 for classmates paying from their own pockets.

Critics lambasted the state-funded schemes as an “appalling” use of taxpayers money by a health service which rations treatment and life-extending drugs for patients with cancer. Meanwhile, obesity experts warned that diet classes were less likely to work if people did not attend them of their own volition, and commit their own money to their efforts.

In 2006, the NHS’s rationing body, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, recommended that GPs send people to free slimming classes, because it was cheaper than weight loss pills or stomach stapling. Since then, Slimming World has sold more than 53,000 vouchers costing £45 to the NHS at a total cost to the taxpayer of more than £2.3 million.

I know weight control is important to good health, but Weight Watchers is not medical treatment. Moreover, if these people were morbidly obese, they should have received real medical help, not small prepackaged meals or aerobics classes.

Oversight boards like NICE are disastrous on more levels than can be counted. We have to make sure that no equivalent central control is ever imposed on Americans.