Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives
Good. Government shouldn’t be telling people what they do with their bodies.
But the government picks up the payment costs, and the other costs include reduced hospital spaces, which directly impacts other people.
I understand your perspective if people are truly independent of one another, but we’re not. We rely on one another and impact each other. That means a reduction in freedom for an increase in security.
I do wish there were a way to opt out, so that people could do whatever they want with their own bodies without harming others, but we’re not there now, so we shouldn’t just accept a reduction in our ability to receive treatment we’re entitled to, to enable freedoms that don’t fit our actual system.
Would you support a law that said public healthcare is unavailable to those who choose to smoke? That would seem to be a reasonable compromise.
I would want to support that, but with a lot of caveats. If there were no chance of a shortage of hospital beds, and people were grandfathered in and given plenty of warning. There’s also the fact that it’s basically impossible to enforce. It would be easy and strongly incentivized to lie about and very difficult and expensive to investigate.
It’s also morally difficult, because one cigarette doesn’t cause cancer. I can absolutely see people who aren’t regular smokers and who aren’t increasing their chances of illness bumming a cigarette once a decade- should they lose access to healthcare? I don’t really think so (because the goal isn’t to punish smokers, but to protect non smokers), but I don’t know how you could write a law that would protect them.
I hate when articles say “will cost X number of lives”. No it won’t. It will cut them short, it will costs years off people’s lives. Unless it’s sterilized people it won’t cost lives.
A person may die at 40 instead of 80 but that is still a life.
You could say this about anything though. A serial killer isn’t taking lives, merely shortening them. Suicide isn’t ending a life it’s just shortening one. Literally all death can be seen as merely the shortening of an otherwise longer life, which makes your distinction pointless.
Yes it’s less extreme language. It’s doesn’t manipulate emotions as much, that’s the point.
How is the language extreme? For something to “cost lives” means exactly for those lives to be cut short, there is no other meaningful definition. The language used is exactly as extreme as the scenario it describes, by definition.
Do you apply your same logic to other scenarios too? Like would rather that “the tsunami cost the lives of 55 people” be reworded as “the tsunami shortened the lives of 55 people”?
You bring up a good point, what does it actually mean? If eight people have their lives shortened by a decade, is that one life lost or eight?
