Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
OVERWEIGHT golfers in Somerset last week had reason to linger a little longer at the 19th hole: the NHS, in association with the local authority, has decided to offer them subsidised golf. Go along to your doctor, tell him you do not do any exercise and that you find it boring just walking about, and he will write out a prescription for cut-price membership of a local golf club.
The flipside to this state benevolence is, of course, taxation. And when the public has reached its limit of tolerance on taxation, there are always compulsory insurance schemes. Stuart Marples, chief executive of the Institute of Healthcare Management, proposes that the NHS be able to derive revenue directly from people who follow dangerous and unhealthy pastimes. He wants skiers, mountaineers, hang-gliding maniacs and the like to be forced to pay into a special insurance fund dedicated to the NHS. Smokers, needless to say, would be targeted once again: 'I am forced to take out insurance to drive my car, but for the very dangerous habit of smoking I don't have to take out any,' says Marples.
Actually, there is a very good reason why motorists have to take out insurance and smokers don't — the compulsory element of motor insurance relates only to the risk posed to third parties, whereas smokers harm nobody but themselves. But no matter. Mr Marples has hit on a concept that our nannying government is likely to find highly attractive. It won't just be fire-eaters who find themselves feeding the NHS's insatiable appetite for cash, not when NHS researchers start producing statistics on the hazards of gardening, DIY and knitting. Under Marples's plan, the NHS would be handed the means to do what it has always threatened to do: to consume the entire economy. Golfers may find their good fortune short-lived; they should enjoy themselves before some government statistician compiles figures for skeletal injuries derived from swinging a golf club.
Ross Clark
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