Basically, I am just fed up of private businesses taking huge profits when things go well and evading their responsibilities and expecting the tax payer to pay when things go badly.
I have a lot of sympathy with this, but see no reason why it should be applied only to the cosmetic surgery industry, when other private businesses do the same thing on an even grander scale. The tobacco industry is top of my list, because giving people lung cancer and other illnesses, and indeed killing them, is an established side effect of the drug they sell, rather than something that occasionally happens when things go wrong. Putting the human cost aside, the economic cost of treating such people, losing their future economic production, and perhaps that of their carers, must be enormous - compared with which replacing a few faulty implants pales into peanuts.
Of course, it would be hard to sue Benson and Hedges for somebody's getting lung cancer, because you couldn't prove in any particular case that it was B&H's products that caused it, even though you know that in general, they do. For that reason a better model might be a punitive tax surcharge on all private companies that sell "risky" products and activities - from bungee jumping to Special Brew - calibrated according to the statistics for what people have cost the NHS as a result of that product/activity. That would be my suggestion, anyway.
I therefore see no reason to spend money to remove them unless and until something actually goes wrong.
Very likely this is right, but if (for example) we knew that a high proportion were very likely to rupture in the next five years, and that it would be much harder and more expensive to treat when that had happened, there might we be an argument (economic as well as moral) for doing it earlier. Without the figures, it's impossible to know.
no subject
I have a lot of sympathy with this, but see no reason why it should be applied only to the cosmetic surgery industry, when other private businesses do the same thing on an even grander scale. The tobacco industry is top of my list, because giving people lung cancer and other illnesses, and indeed killing them, is an established side effect of the drug they sell, rather than something that occasionally happens when things go wrong. Putting the human cost aside, the economic cost of treating such people, losing their future economic production, and perhaps that of their carers, must be enormous - compared with which replacing a few faulty implants pales into peanuts.
Of course, it would be hard to sue Benson and Hedges for somebody's getting lung cancer, because you couldn't prove in any particular case that it was B&H's products that caused it, even though you know that in general, they do. For that reason a better model might be a punitive tax surcharge on all private companies that sell "risky" products and activities - from bungee jumping to Special Brew - calibrated according to the statistics for what people have cost the NHS as a result of that product/activity. That would be my suggestion, anyway.
I therefore see no reason to spend money to remove them unless and until something actually goes wrong.
Very likely this is right, but if (for example) we knew that a high proportion were very likely to rupture in the next five years, and that it would be much harder and more expensive to treat when that had happened, there might we be an argument (economic as well as moral) for doing it earlier. Without the figures, it's impossible to know.