Whose responsibility?
The recent health scare over whether a certain brand of breast implant is actually likely to put women who have them at risk seems to have started a heated argument between the NHS and the private sector. Although women in France are being told that they can have the implants and removed and replaced at no cost to themselves, here in the UK no-one has yet taken responsibility for paying for all those surgical procedures – and both sides are remaining very stubborn!
The NHS has said it is more than happy to pay for replacement surgery for those women who had the first implants done on the NHS in the first place. In reality, this means that only women who had breast restructuring after cancer will get the surgery for free as all cosmetic procedures are carried out at private hospitals. Private hospitals themselves are saying that it is not their responsibility to test implants for safety as this falls under the remit of the government agency NICE. Their argument says that if NICE authorised the use of these particular implants in the UK, then it is NICE’s fault that they have to be replaced and therefore the cost of the all those surgeries should come out of the public purse.
Unsurprisingly, many people are unhappy at the thought of taxes being spent on cosmetic surgery procedures, even if there is now a medical need for them to be carried out. As with most debates of this nature, there is no one single customer view that is right; women with the implants need to have them removed so that their health won’t be damaged, whereas those of us who haven’t felt the need to butcher ourselves in the name of vanity feel aggrieved that we’re going to end up funding Jordan’s latest boob job.
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