Knotty regulations around public healthcare risk undermining freedom

In Europe, healthcare systems are failing despite being sustained by taxpayer money. The more unhealthy people are, the more they burden the struggling healthcare system and the more money needs to be removed from citizens’ pockets in the form of taxes.

The side effects of public healthcare include the severe loss of freedom. While health matters, so does freedom. If recent events across Europe are anything to go by, we risk throwing away our freedoms in the name of public health. Citizens should have the right to remain as healthy or unhealthy as they wish and exercise their civic rights freely, even on health matters.

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I used to relish travelling in the smoking car of the Hungarian public railways. While they existed, there were always only a few people sitting there, less than half of whom smoked. The opened windows let in fresh air, creating a much more comfortable atmosphere than the overcrowded non-smoking cars filled with stuffy air haunted by the smell of body odour, junk food, and the occasional bodily fluid. I do not smoke, but I enjoyed being able to make a choice. It smelled like freedom.

Now, under an EU-wide trend, smoking is banished from trains, and pubs, from the vicinity of certain areas such as bus stops, and now there is even talk of exorcising smoking from the terraces of restaurants.

Smoking is definitely not healthy, and second-hand smoke can harm you. Still, your choice to be unhealthy should not be surgically removed. A lot of people took up vaping instead of old-fashioned tobacco, partly because tobacco companies want to stay relevant and partly because vaping is a healthier option. This was a choice people made on their own.

Yet smoking bans are also banning vaping, despite a lot of question marks about how lumping vaping in with smoking will affect public health. Granted, vaping is addictive and it is by no means healthy, but nor is it a gateway to smoking cigarettes as it is often portrayed.

Why are decision makers chasing after people’s habits? Why are they determined to police behaviours without having a clear picture of their effects? Because people’s health is now a public affair, thanks to public healthcare.

In Europe, healthcare systems are failing despite being sustained by taxpayer money. The more unhealthy people are, the more they burden the struggling healthcare system and the more money needs to be removed from citizens’ pockets in the form of taxes.

An unfashionable habit

Smoking is often a target of regulations as smoking is not fashionable today as it once was. Cigarettes used to be the symbol of burgeoning women’s rights through a clever campaign, and silver screen heroes such as James Bond often lit one up. The decrease of the fictional spy’s smoking habit shows how uncool smoking became.

Although obesity is increasing, and heart disease is the largest cause of death, smoking is targeted, which is a contributing factor, but so is eating junk food and not exercising enough. Not that governments don’t try influencing your eating habits through sin taxes and regulations, but smoking bans are more fashionable, because smoking itself is less so.

Unfortunately, though, this approach is flawed. Bans do not work. Look at how alcohol prohibition or the War on Drugs cause a surge in crime. These interventionist policy approaches also cause more health risks as people turn to illicit products. Healthcare regulations do not make people healthier. They just make them less free.

Time to ease up

Instead of tightening the government’s grip on all walks of life, European states should ease up. Don’t take away public healthcare, but let people opt out. Let private health insurance companies decide how much they charge smokers, if they want to. Let people make their own decisions.

It is seemingly a hard sell to take away the apparent free healthcare for the sake of stinking people. Yet healthcare is not free. Taxes sustain it (or they try to, at least). What would be too big a price for you? You might easily trade in your ability to smoke, but would you trade in your beer, your burger, or your car? Would freedom be too high a price?

How you live, how healthy you want to be, what you would like to eat and consume should be your own choice. You should be able to choose your healthcare provider. In order to do this, you should exercise your right to choose at elections carefully. Health matters, but so does freedom.

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