Inflicting their ills on us

Subject: Inflicting their ills on us.

There been a flurry of interest shown in reports that people who have contracted AIDS are now living a full life, with expectations of living as long as a normal person.

Doctors and AIDS support groups have welcomed this as a conquest of medicine over a scourge which threatened a world wide epidemic. People who have the virus willingly  confess to their new life as a miracle, an opportunity to live their lives as they desire, in a sexually explicit fashion with  multiple partners, knowing that the pill or pills will keep the virus in their blood at bay for years on end and that the dread which once haunted the homosexually active AIDS community on a knife point throughout their lives is a thing of the past.

Reporter after reporter described the medical advances relating to the disease as a triumph but no one mentioned the cost. No one mentioned the financial strain put on the NHS. No one, least of all the smirking gay man, thought of the expense they have brought to society by simply not curbing their sexual ardour and practising safe sex.

The hedonistic pleasure is deemed a "right" irrespective of the thousands of pounds each patient will cost you and I, year in and year out. Why practice self discipline when someone else will pick up the tab. Better to gloat at being free to continue their proclivity since the stupid public will be happy to accept the cost without connecting that due to a squeeze on funds, people will have to wait, often in pain, an extra year or more before the same health system can afford a hip replacement. One hip replacement probably cost the same as a months tablets for our gay friend but the consequences of his actions are lost on him in his demand to do what he wants irrespective of the price. 

I wonder as he pops his daily pills does he ever consider where or who contributes to his narcissistic demand, it certainly didn't seem to pass his mind in the interview he gave on television.

The NHS is groaning under the weight of self inflicted ills from drunkenness, to obesity.

The psychiatric wards are full of drug induced paranoia. Smokers have long known the damage they do to themselves with every packet of cigarettes and yet they continue and so, as we goggle at the money which is sucked like a sponge by our medical service, perhaps it is time to charge those people who knowingly inflict their ills on us.