You don't see how stuff like that could easily be solved by a basic income? Overweight -> Poorer people are overweight because they can only afford cheap stuff. Stressful/physically-harmful job -> If it's a choice between starving and a stressful job, most people will choose the stressful job. Anxiety, that's easy -> bills. And the other stuff is related to a stressful job, if all your energy is going towards work, you have none left over to deal with bozo/dead-beats, or for yoga or other activities that require energy to change the habit.
I also notice that you're stereotyping the patients as lazy and good-for-nothing, when... Well, I mean sure people like that exist, they do everywhere. But they're not a majority, not even close.
What you call "choices", I call "circumstances". There was an experiment in Canada in the 70s called Mincome, a town called Dauphin in Manitoba was given, every citizen, the opportunity to have 60% of then-current poverty level money given to them. Recently a woman has gone through records of Dauphin both before, during, and since Mincome, and found that not only did people -not- quit their jobs and subsist off mincome, but they went to the hospital less, needed less psychological support, education and high-school attendance went up, and mothers spent more time with their newborn babies. All of which, especially the first two, lead to either lower costs to the government directly, or to the possibility of higher taxes to the government in the future (babies who are more developed and can lead better lives, or students who are better educated and can get better jobs).
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Topic: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread! (Read 216557 times)