Discrimination

Discrimination is everywhere, it's essentially what people do. However when it comes to what the state offers, then discrimination is a problem as smokers are now finding out.
Mail.

Patients are being denied minor treatments because they smoke, The Mail on Sunday has found.
In one case a healthy middle-aged man was told he could not have a ten-minute operation to cut a small benign growth off the side of his head, because of his habit.
Paul Merrett thought it would be no problem to get the inch-long fatty lump, called a lipoma, removed.
But when he attended King George Surgery in Stevenage, his GP said he could not have the minor operation – which doctors often do under local anaesthetic in their own consulting rooms.
Mr Merrett, 46, said: ‘I was told, in no uncertain terms, that unless I gave up smoking or signed up to a quitting clinic they would refuse to treat me. I was gobsmacked.’
He claims the doctor told him: ‘These directions are not mine. It’s not me refusing this treatment, it’s the NHS trust.’
Mr Merrett, who smokes ten roll-ups a day, said: ‘It makes me livid. I can count how many times I have needed to rely on the NHS in the past ten years on one hand. I pay into the system and it’s my right to be able to use it when I need it.’

Now I don't smoke, never have, though it's never bothered me in the way that some people get het up  about it, there are far worse things out there than smoking after all. Still, if you pay into the NHS via your National Insurance ponzi scheme then you'd expect the same benefits to be available to all, not on a selective basis. That's not how the righteous see things of course, they only want healthy people to have access to the NHS... healthy meaning that no one is using it at all. They want lists and exclusions that fit their own particular prejudices and if they get away with one thing, then you can be damned sure that these lists will be expanded, you can see it in their current pogroms against smokers, drinkers, the obese (by their standards not the actual one) those who eat too much sugar, high in cholesterol, high blood pressure etc.
Not that they aren't prepared to take your money, just prevent you from using it as it was intended, rather like an insurance claim being rejected due to some small clause that you hadn't noticed, with the added insult to injury of not being able to opt out.
Mr Merrett is probably the first of many, he managed to get it overturned, but sooner or later it will be the norm and then they'll move to other targets until only the healthy have access to the NHS, basically those who don't need it...