We’ve found a new drug. Not, like, for Saturday nights with a line of coke and three shots of Jägermeister, but a medical drug. Oh, one’a’them. Well, not so much ‘found’ it, as slightly ‘re-purposed’ it. Possibly, just adjusted the claims made about it. Its a diabetes drug. And causes weight loss. But now, in higher doses, it can ‘massively reduce heart attacks AND strokes!!!’ Wow! That’s good, they’re big killers. As in: ‘they kill big people’, as well as ‘killing lots of people’. But the query (in my overly cynical and statistic-a-phobic mind) is whether this drug is ‘curing’ the risk of those two killer illnesses, or whether it just reduces the person’s weight to the extent where the risk of heart attack and stroke are severely reduced as they are for most thin people? Though really, either way, its a win. We end up with a nation of thinner people, having less heart attacks and strokes; a win-win.

Unless you’re paying the bill.

The drug in its diabetes/weight loss concentration costs £74 per month for each patient. Probably be a bit more for the higher dosage. And they reckon its only 12 million people who’ll really benefit by this. Which… add on a lot of zeroes… multiply by 13… divide by the square root of your waste measurement, comes to just shy of a billion quid. Every month. So that’s just, say 10 billion pounds a year so the NHS won’t have to treat heart attack and stroke victims who are overweight, thus keeping the beds free for the healthy old people who can’t leave hospital because there’s nowhere in the care system to put them.

What we need to do is get some more barges. Big ones. With rooms bigger than that one in Dorset has, cos these people are much bigger than refugees, and fill them with overweight people and starve them. No booze. No fat, sugars or carbs and no way off. That way, instead of 10 bil a year, its the initial outlay on a few barges and enough lettuce and broccoli for 12 million people. Simple.

It all comes down to money. If the NHS had Nigel Farage’s promsied “365 million pounds EVERY DAY!!!!”, for Brexit, we might be nicer. But even though I actually imagined the head of EU finance personally writing us a cheque every single day, it, kind’a, never happened. So there’s a shortfall. And as everyone in England is violently opposed to making any kind of contribution, however ‘nominal’ towards healthcare, I suppose we’ll just have add this 10 billion to the total. And just keep doing that until Kier Starmer dies or the cost of the NHS is actually greater than our GDP. I suppose we can always borrow.

Happy, healthy Wednesday

A xxxx