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 Waiting Room
Medical mishaps reported each week by our covert correspondent, Jackie Marshall, who works at the coalface of modern medicine - the waiting room at a National Health Service (NHS) clinic. (Why not catch up on Jackie's most recent trials and tribulations.)
The Tattoo Solution
October 30, 2006
How Politics Works: lesson #137: Sleight Of Hand. Whenever there's a real problem that will mean egg-on-face; distract your audience with another, smaller one to make a big fuss about. I can't tell you the number of times scandals - war, graft, wastage - have been glossed over by someone shouting "Look! There's someone foxhunting over there!" God knows what they're going to do for distractions now that, to their surprise, they've actually succeeded in banning it.
Right now, though, it's tattoos. Well, the real problem is that our government keeps giving IT contracts to a company that has almost made a religion of a) going drastically over budget and b) producing computer systems that don't actually do the job they're meant to do. The bill so far - and bear in mind that we don't actually have it yet - for the integrated NHS system that was meant to give healthcare providers instant access to anyone's records, anywhere in the country, stands at £12bn (that's £200 (US$379) - for every man, woman and child in the country).
So what's being done about it? Questions in parliament about NHS wastage, that's what. We're £300m overspent this year and they want savings of £2bn in the coming one. Yup, that's right: £300m. Across the whole country, providing free healthcare for 60 million people. As in £5 per person. £300m; £12bn: it's not hard to work out where the deficit's coming from, is it?
Tattoo removal, apparently. Our politicians and right-wing press have been huffing and puffing about the fact that the NHS spend on tattoo removal is - wouldn't you just know it? - £300m. According to some people. According to others, it's £35m. Anyway, it's nearly 200,000 tattoos, either way. Disgusting. Disgraceful. When people are dying of breast cancer. They brought it upon themselves. They should suffer the consequences.
Moralism and healthcare: uneasy bed partners. I see a lot of tatts come past my desk, and it's a tad more complicated than that. Because not every tattoo is an embarrassing pubic Daffy Duck that looks even more stupid once you're got stretch marks. Frankly, I'm right up there with the serves-them-right brigade on those. But the fact is, from where I'm sitting, there's a big correlation between certain types of tattoo and mental health - both getting them and living with them afterward - and getting these taken off, while it may sting the health budget, saves the country as a whole untold millions more than it costs.
Think about it: do you seriously think that someone who gets his entire face covered in an inky blue cobweb is in his right mind? And, if someone with FUCK OFF etched across his forehead - and there are people with just that - or LOVE and HATE on his knuckles came in for a job interview, would you give it to him? And yes, you may say it's that popular buzzword, a "lifestyle choice," but the fact is that the schizophrenic 17-year-old who has something like this done is a very different person from the medicated 35-year-old who can't get a job or a family or any form of stability because he frightens people, and someone in that position is going to be a massive drain on his country's resources - welfare payments, housing, lack of tax income, lack of economic productivity, repeat prescriptions for antidepressants - for an entire lifetime while he bears his own personal Scarlet Letter.
Healthcare should be about pragmatism, not moralism. People seem to forget, in their rush to condemn, that countries don't, generally, set-up national health systems because they're rich enough to dole out charity, but rather because a workforce that is unable to work is a country's surest road to poverty. Go down the Lifestyle Choice route, and before long we'll be turning idiot teenagers away from ER because they got drunk before they fell under a car. And should we be paying for joggers' knee replacements? Sport-related quadriplegia? It's a lifestyle choice, after all.
The answer, obviously, is to stop people getting them in the first place, not punish them, schoolmarm-style, afterward. So here's my suggestion. Start taxing tattoos, cigarette-style, at source. A little flower on the shoulder-blade should be taxed at, say, £10 - and also not removable free on the country. Anything with a name, given the longevity of the average tattooed relationship, should be a grand. And anything that cannot be covered by trousers and along-sleeved shirt should carry a tax burden of something in the region of a small flat in central London. With massive jail sentences for tattooists working on the black market. That way, only the stupid rich would get them done. And the stupid rich can afford to pay for their own tattoo removal.
(Catch up on the most recent happenings in the waiting room.)
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