British NHS To Maybe Ban Surgeries For Smokers And The Obese

A sign they are running out of money:

The NHS will ban patients from surgery indefinitely unless they lose weight or quit smoking, under controversial plans drawn up in Hertfordshire.

The restrictions – thought to be the most extreme yet to be introduced by health services – immediately came under attack from the Royal College of Surgeons.

Its vice president called for an “urgent rethink” of policies which he said were “discriminatory” and went against the fundamental principles of the NHS.

In recent years, a number of areas have introduced delays for such patients – with some told operations will be put back for months, during which time they are expected to try to lose weight or stop smoking.

But the new rules, drawn up by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in Hertfordshire, say that obese patients “will not get non-urgent surgery until they reduce their weight” at all, unless the circumstances are exceptional.

The criteria also mean smokers will only be referred for operations if they have stopped smoking for at least eight weeks, with such patients breathalysed before referral.

Government programs spend as prolifically as they can when the money flows freely because everybody who has any authority wants to enlarge their own fiefdoms and power. This restriction is actually a sign of massive shortage behind the scenes.

Some say this collapse will be slow, but I see a mechanism where it might not be. The shift from r to K is accelerated by the fact that by the time the conditions have shifted enough to turn r-psychologies into K’s, the only thing keeping resources flowing is the irresponsibility of r.

Long before conditions are bad enough to turn all of society’s psychologies K, conditions would collapse everything if people just began to act K. As an example, after the Great Depression, there were people who would never trust a bank again. That is K-selected, keenly aware of future risks, and driven to look at future outcomes more than short term gains. If right now people realized the banks couldn’t be trusted, bonds were scams that would eventually default, and that someday everyone will need a mass of savings just to survive, they would pull their wealth out of the system, begin hoarding their wealth, and trigger the collapse now. Because it would be triggered early, the collapse would be less horrific, and people would be better prepared to deal with it and rebuild in the aftermath.

But people now lack that K-selected caution, so the economic foundations will continue to deteriorate as leaders mortgage what little is left of our future to prop things up now. And people will leave their money in the system propping it up until the collapse is forced by the unavoidable circumstances produce by the massive deterioration that will happen between now and then. Then, people will begin to turn K, and the mix of their K-behaviors and the conditions so horrific they drive r’s to K, will combine to produce a shocking collapse, probably initiated with bank runs.

I think collapses can be slow, when they happen in small nations which can draw resources from far more massive and richer nations, and whose citizens have some measure of K-psychologies to start the collapse sooner, and help them handle the rigors of it stoically.

But when the nations collapsing are world superpowers whose citizens are r-strategists, I think the collapses are likely to be massive and fast. If you look at the crash of ’29, with stock brokers jumping out of windows and bank failures sweeping across the nation as panic sets in, I think that is borne out.

I just can’t see what is coming this time starting slowly, or being non-violent. It has been building too long, we have gone far too r, and by the time it hits, we will have leveraged everything which might have blunted the impact.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because our collapse will be epic among collapses