Health and austerity: When budget cuts cost lives

Insanity.

European leaders slicing away at national budgets are keen to persuade voters that healthcare is sacrosanct, but they will struggle to escape the truth that cutting spending elsewhere also eventually costs lives.

If a government's first priority is to protect the lives of its people, then ringfencing health spending while cutting other budgets and trying to drive down the cost of medicines -- policies being pursued in Europe -- seem sensible options.

Did you catch that?

"If a government's first priority is to protect the lives of its people..."

Whoa.

Protecting the lives of its people, not through national defense, but by making the rest of us pay for the bad behavior of others.

Making the rest of us pay to rescue people who are too fat by choice.

The answer is plain and simple, let the calorically irresponsible experience the results of their behavior without subsidies from the rest of us.

Only then will behavior and, by extension, health improve.

Oh, yeah.

And vote the entitlementalista politicians out of office ASAP.

Or get rid of them sooner.