the brilliantly leaping gazelle

As will come as a surprise to absolutely no-one familiar the writings my blog, I do not value the survival of our species as much as other people seem to do. The hysteria and doom mongering that has characterized the response Coronavirus episode is, to me at any rate, as bewildering as it is nonsensical. Yes, by all means be aware of the risks and ways to minimise them, but some perspective please. At the risk of causing offence to people who get offended by logic, all but one of the people who’ve died so far have been over 60 years old and all of them had underlying health problems, so the chances are that a harsh winter would have killed them anyway. Why is this not even mentioned, that we have an ageing population, one that the adult social care system is struggling to cope with so in essence all the Coronavirus is doing is hastening the inevitable.

Yesterday the government announced a raft of financial measures, which they hope will help people cope with the unprecedented economic challenges that necessarily arise following the government’s health advice. Good for them.! Jolly well done! Bravo! Goody gum drops!

However, methinks there is a better, more effective way to spend some of the money, a spend moreover that if properly implemented could easily become a truly innovative solution to the conundrum of footing the bill of an ageing population.

Government sponsored euthanasia.

No, seriously, before you dismiss it as ludicrous, think of the measures announced yesterday and then ask yourself exactly how many of them will have any practical efficacy beyond this present situation? Remember quantative easing and the theory that if the Bank of England printed £billions of new money, the banks would then pass that money onto small and medium sized businesses and this would help revive the economy after the global financial crisis? And, as is so often the case, what works in the theory doesn’t work in practice but what did work was the banks working for themselves and using the money to shore up their losses. Jo and Janet Nobody might get a little bit of help but it’ll be the usual snouts getting their fill at the trough.

Anyway, where we? Ah yes! Government sponsored euthanasia, that’s where!

Given the age group of death victims perhaps that might be hitherto electorally suicidal policy a couple of months ago, but faced with a rapidly changing landscape might the previously unthinkable soon become not just thinkable but eminently sensible.

If the government works out the cost of a patient with certain ailments to the NHS, local authorities and social services et al., per year and then work out the life expectancy on average is for those affected, calculate the total cost to the public purse, then offer them a lump sum of 60% of the sum when their 80 and commit to die within two years. This figure would decrease by 3.5%% every year, so if you were 86 and finally came round to this, you’d get a lump sum of 39% of the average annual cost. That’d be the last age it would apply to. Everyone’s a winner, society, the government and the individual, given as how the average life expectancy for a UK national is 80.96 years. I haven’t yet worked out how this would be enforced but the idea’s sound.

You disagree? Oh grow up! How do you think life insurance companies work out their premiums? Or do you think actuaries are actors who perform Shakespearian tragedies? Why should the state have to pay to prevent nature taking its course? Why, given the challenges faced by the NHS don’t they implement an upper age limit beyond which any type of in-patient hospital care wouldn’t be allowed? Why is an old persons life as equal as a younger persons? Please explain it to me using words of four syllables or less, because this baffles me. The NHS is a resource like any other and like every other resource it isn’t finite.

If people did opt for government sponsored euthanasia it’d be the adult nappies, dementia and soft food years they’d be missing out on remember. Not a trip to Disneyland – the proper one mind, not the one in Paris. It would also put the nails in the coffin of the  suspicion that the Tory party have been unduly influenced by their membership, who tend to be old, male, white and comfortably off and not the overwhelming majority of people who voted for them, who are not.