Brits to Crackdown on Wine Drinkers

Yesterday I posted about the efforts of the British National Health Service to require smokers to quit smoking for a period of time before surgeries or face longer waiting times for those surgeries. Today, The Times notes that the same agency will be going after middle class wine drinkers as a part of new effort to curb alcohol abuse.

Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt.

Under the plans published today, a fresh audit is to be conducted by the Government into the overall costs of alcohol abuse to society and the National Health Service.

“We want to target older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening,” a Whitehall source said. “They do not realise the damage they are doing to their health and that they risk developing liver disease. We are not talking here about the traditional wino.”

The assault on Middle England’s drinking habits is part of a three-strand approach, which will also target underage drinking and heavy alcohol consumption among those aged 18-24.

snip

Today’s strategy, by the Home Office and the Department of Health, broadens the Government’s offensive against excessive drinking, with the focus moving beyond teenagers and the binge-drinkers to include those regularly sipping wine at home.

As part of the strategy, ministers wish to highlight the increasing burden that drink-related disease is placing on the NHS, which four years ago was estimated to be costing between £1.3 billion and £1.7 billion. Ministers want drunkenness in public to be as socially unacceptable in ten years’ time as smoking or drink-driving is today.

Cracking down on drinking and driving is a legitimate public health issue. Similarly, preventing public drunkenness is also a legitimate issue for the government to tackle. But I am not sure why cracking down on at home wine drinking is such a problem.

First, if the person is drinking at home, then they are by definition not publicly drunk nor are they likely to be drinking and driving. Second, this move is nothing more than effort to change behavior because the cost to the goverment run health care is too high. So the public is spending money trying to regulate private behavior because the government spends too much money in another area. Does that strike anyone else as bizzare.

This is the problem with a largely government funded health care system. Private behavior in a largely privately run health care system that affects health care expenditures is accounted for by increased premium for those people most likely to engage in the expensive behavior. But in a public run health care system, with public expenditures covering costly private behavior, the answer is either to cut services across the board, a politically dangerous move; cut services for those engaged in the behavior--which probably can't be done easily or consistenly, or seek to censor the private behavior.

Such a move is not consistent with a free society.

So long as the middle class wine drinkers are drinking in their private home and not getting behind the wheel, why should they be targeted with the same zeal as underage drinkers or drunk drivers? Those who want a publicly run health care system for all the United States would do well to look long and hard at what is happening in the U.K.