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Whether benefit entitlement for people with addictions or obesity should be linked to accepting treatment
Some bits and pieces over the years from rightsnet news:
- From 2009: Parliamentary Human Rights Committee says govt should not proceed with sanctions for drug dependent claimants
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200809/jtselect/jtrights/78/78.pdf
From 2010: The SSAC said that the proposed Welfare Reform Drug Recovery scheme was flawed & unlikely to be effective
- From June 2010: Govt decides not to take forward Welfare Reform Drug Recovery pilot following SSAC report
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/radical-rethink-on-getting-drug-and-alcohol-users-back-to-work
- From Aug 2014: CJS thinktank recommends ‘welfare card’ pilot for addicts who refuse to engage in treatment
http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/publications/ambitious-for-recovery
- From April 2015: Making weight loss treatment compulsory for claimants is ‘financially & ethically questionable’ s says The Lancet
- This week: Health Select Committee chair says cutting benefits of addicts who don’t accept treatment is ethically unacceptable
- Today: Govt stats on ‘Working age benefit recipients in drug or alcohol treatment’
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/working-age-benefit-recipients-in-drug-or-alcohol-treatment
Part of my response is that the issue of obesity is the province of health and food policy - not benefits.
That’ll be question - 7. What are the legal, ethical and other implications of linking benefit entitlements
to take up of appropriate treatment or support?
The last two posts were entirely information lifted from the NHS.
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Obesity/Pages/Causes.aspx
Plain fact is people have choices and no one really cares of those choices until it concerns public money. The obese are everywhere and (as a nation) we’re getting bigger - and it’s down to lifestyle in the main.
Whether there’s a choice or not is more complex - types of work/travel/family commitments.
If your BMI is 35 or 40, no one is going to intervene other than your GP etc. You may get polite advice and nothing more.
From the numerous earlier endeavors I feel this is more likely a lets’s look like we’re doing something - I cannot see within the present legal framework that any policy could come of it. The fact that successful healthcare policy keeps more of us alive for longer means an identifiable problem of costs was spotted a long time ago but never addressed and hence everything is underfunded, be it pensions, social security, the NHS or the boom industry that is care homes.
All that is likely to happen is more nothing.
More on obesity/lifestyle choices in the news
A 2012 UCLA study on rats showed that too much fructose – a simple sugar found in fruits, honey and vegetables – effectively slowed the brain by affecting insulin’s ability to help brain cells convert sugar into energy for thought.
But eating omega-3 fatty acids (flaxseed oil, mackerel, herring and trout) counteracted this mental disruption by protecting against damage to the synapses, the chemical pathways in the brain. Dr Sarah Brewer, a medical nutritionist, warns of the damage sweet things can do to your grey matter: “Brain cells need glucose to function but too much in a short time will cause a sugar rush and make you feel over-wired.”
There is also the argument that the below subsistence level of benefit payments constrains people into an unhealthy diet as they cannot afford to eat healthily. To what extent does lack of money, as a direct result of government policy, actually serve to perpetuate the problem. Is this a “lifestyle choice”.
The causes of obesity cannot simply be reduced to a simple equation or source. See here, for example.
http://www.medicinenet.com/obesity_weight_loss/page3.htm#what_causes_obesity
Efforts should be concentrated on prevention through education. Efforts also need to be concentrated on the food industry, on the amount of refined sugar in foods, and in product labelling. One of the myths is that foods high in fat content are the major cause of obesity. It’s not quite as simple as that. Foods high in saturated fats might not be good for your health but that is another matter. Taste is important to food. So what food manufacturers do is replace fats with carbohydrates. The slew of the low fat foods, high in simple carbohydrates and low in fat will cause obesity more easily than foods with low simple carbohydrate content and higher fat content.
Another issue is how you measure obesity. Take the body mass index for example. This might be fine for purposes of statistical analysis for clinical classification but misleading as to whether a person’s lifestyle and diet are in themselves unhealthy. The measure of obesity using the BMI only is a poor, and often meaningless, indicator. That is why we have seen fit and healthy athletes (both professional and amateur) classed as obese because they have a BMI within a certain range.
Of course exercise is important but it has to be the right kind of exercise. Anaerobic exercise (i.e. weight training, is no good). It is oxygen that burns fat, so aerobic exercise is important, jogging for instance. In other words, exercise which gets us out of breath and causes the body to take in more oxygen. For many people who are obese and disabled, this isn’t an option, so just eating less isn’t going to make any real difference.
But, hey, why look at a problem’s complexities when it’s easier to target the (so called) problem itself, particularly when you can play on two of the public’s prejudices at the same time, welfare dependency and slobbish overeating amongst the working classes. This idea isn’t new and I suspect it came from some right wing public think tank who (as has been hinted at) saw a way of enabling the private sector to make a buck. It’s probably been taken off the shelf and dusted down now to deflect attention away from some of the more controversial proposals in the welfare reform bill, such as cuts to child tax credit. We shall have to wait and see.
edited for grammar
[ Edited: 31 Jul 2015 at 02:39 pm by nevip ]There is also the argument that the below subsistence level of benefit payments constrains people into an unhealthy diet as they cannot afford to eat healthily. To what extent does lack of money, as a direct result of government policy, actually serve to perpetuate the problem. Is this a “lifestyle choice”.
I’ve never really bought into that theory.
Milk is cheaper than coca-cola - Porridge is cheaper than cornflakes. An apple can be cheaper than a chocolate Bar.
Any mass produced bread is not particularly good. As is any processed food.
My admittedly uneducated and untrained observation is that food is typically cheapest (there are exceptions) in it’s natural form - frozen or fresh.
The exceptions are meats for instance - bill the bear (name changed) is cheaper than, for instance, ham off the bone in my local supermarket. Then there’s meat products - mostly made of another meat, like tinned hot dogs (mainly chicken) - Begs the question of what is it in Bill the Bear?
Blog piece from chair of the Commons Health Select Committee:
‘There is a dark question at the heart of Professor Black’s call for evidence on the work challenges facing benefit claimants who are struggling with addiction and obesity and it should worry us all. She asks, ‘What are the legal, ethical and other implications of linking benefit entitlements to take up of appropriate treatment or support?
The inclusion of this question calls into doubt the independence of her review as Professor Black cannot be in any doubt about the fundamental principles of medical consent; that it must be freely given and informed…. ‘
More @ http://t.co/dPju3J8JgI
[ Edited: 31 Jul 2015 at 12:56 pm by shawn mach ]Interesting bit about lifestyles - inc. food.
Since the 1930s IQs across the world have largely increased thanks to better living conditions, improved nutrition and education. But boffins are now raising concerns that for the last decade, IQ scores have not just been levelling out but declining, and our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point in the last 50 years.
On a lighter note, this is the newspaper that yesterday advertised ‘Fartasy Football’ and the day before referred to Prince Charles as the ‘heir to the thrown’. I like the latter especially.
Shawn - yon link does not work - ?
Must say I hold very much with Nevip - this is political posturing, lots of noise. But there are serious implications and we need to respond.
Cheers Andrew .. looks like she’s included an apostrophe in her URL which got stripped out .... hopefully this will work
I think we can say for sure (and it has certainly been my experience) that there’s a link between poverty and obesity just because the more chaotic your lifestyle is (and for most people down at the bottom of the food chain life is pretty chaotic) the less likely you are to make healthy lifestyle choices. There’s obviously a variety of reasons for this- comfort eating is one of them (just like comfort drinking, or comfort smoking), another is cost (whilst I take the point that junk food is not necessarily cheaper than decent raw ingredients, it’s far more likely that you’ll stock up with Turkey Twizzlers or the equivalent from your local pound shop than go on a search for reasonably priced fresh veg/fruit or dried pulses), convenience (if you’re a low-paid shift worker or a lone parent or a carer or physically disabled you may just not have the time or opportunity to shop around), another is lack of education/mental health issues/general inadequacy when it comes to coping with life- just about anything that renders you vulnerable in fact. And it’s a vicious circle of course.
One thing is for sure- as with just about everything else we’ve seen, you can guarantee that the stick will be enormous and the carrot (no pun intended!) will be miniscule.
comfort smoking
That’s one addiction that’s been left off the list. So far….
If I was to be cynical (me? cynical??) I’d say that was revenue-driven….
With the shortage of specialist health resources for these various addictions, I cant think that coercing benefit claimants into using these valuable resources is a priority.
If I was to be cynical (me? cynical??) I’d say that was revenue-driven….
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