The idea will never get enough support. I'm sure someone was ranting on about the same idea with smokers a few years ago.
I'm pretty sure this would be a bad idea. If you start something like this off it never really ends. You start with drinkers, then smokers, then heroin addicts and other drugs, then you move onto people with eating disorders, then onto selfharm (cutting, burning etc), attempted suicides/succeeded suicides. It would just get stupider and stupider, the asthmatic who forgot to take their inhailer one morning and later had an attack, the diabetic that ate a cookie so on and so forth. Problem is with propositons like this, even though they are thought up for the best of reasons whether it be to reduce financial strain on the nhs or to try and disuade people from getting into those situations this is not the solution. The message it actually gives out is that if you have the cash you can f*ck yourself up as much as you want.Even the concept behinde it is flawed, by acknowledging this it's once again enforcing the idea that money is more important than health and that you don't deserve treatment if it's self inflicted. Slight problem here, which I thought more people on this site would understand, if people who get drunk and hurt themselves should have to pay then why shouldnt the person who cuts themselves and needs stiches? Or the person who starves themselves to the point of hospitalisation? The smoker who ends up with cancer? Along with all of the aforementioned.
The NHS is there to provide health care to the community and if acts like this were put in place it would eventually lead to a Private Health Care system, such as america, where you can only get decent treatment if you have the cash. You might argue that this won't happen, but it will, us humans metaphorically shoot ourselves in the foot all the time, we're fantastic at it.
Also, what about the people who drink and then get hurt by someone else?
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