As for question two, yes he should sue. The government made a promise and is not holding to the agreement.

I believe in the right to fail. Eating 20,000 calories per day is CHOOSING to die. He wants to off himself, why should I stand in his way?

It is not moral to take the earned wealth of one by threat of force to another. Health care should be totally in the private sector.

Acting as if these pragmatic choices are correct supposes the acceptance to the original error.

Pragmatism is evil.

I would honor his wishes by removing from him all his choices. He has made poor ones and surrendered his responsibility and authority over his care.

A diet of high fiber and low fat along with as much physical exertion as possible…all carefully monitored.

One could pay staff and housing costs from his reduced health burden and govt burden (assuming his disability makes him a recipient of govt funds for housing, food and clothing)

Those who volunteer for govt servitude should be accommodated. Those who think so little of their personal freedoms that they will abdicate all responsibility and authority should have their demands honored.

“B. Mr. Mason ate his way into trouble, so doesn’t deserve to win his lawsuit. Regarding the NHS, it is horribly inefficient, but any court-imposed damages would just get passed on to taxpayers, so there’s no possible upside.”

By scheduling the first, cancelled surgery, the NHS committed itself to provide treatment; once that commitment was made, Mason’s prior irresponsibility was no longer the point afaic. The upside to passing the cost of damages to the taxpayers is that it might help push the taxpayers to deal with the monster they have allowed to be created in their name.

So, by elimination, I vote for A.

I am a Physician. I believe that weight-loss surgery, while effective, is only effective in the short run. It forces the patient to eat smaller meals, but over time the pouch will stretch and the patient will learn to work around the smaller pouch (i.e. continuously eat high calorie/inappropriate foods). Without understanding why he was choosing to eat 20K a day, and how he was getting that number of calories to his bedside, it is impossible to understand the breadth of the problem.

Look, the NHS in the UK is a flawed health system. It has necessarily turned to rationing care as a means of controlling costs, and results in stories just as this. As a limited government Constitutionalist (small “l” libertarian) it is neither the job of the government to solve this individual’s problems, nor is it the responsibility of government to pay for his individual choices. Nobody (at least nobody from the government) was standing over him forcing food into his stomach.

ANY insurer or medical practitioner would be at risk of a lawsuit for failure to diagnose and adequately treat such a serious illness. (And yes, severe OCDs such as eating disorders are very serious, and not cured by telling the patient to “just stop” doing whatever the harmful compulsion is.) The same issue would exist in a completely free medical-care market, since it’s an issue of professional incompetence.

Even if there was no underlying condition officially recognized that proves little. Medicine is still discovering stuff. Look up the history of fibromyalgia (those folks wanted massive doses of opiates before the condition was understood – they were considered garden variety addicts).

So let me go with insufficient information.

Which would then tend to incline me towards NHS (the insurance company) should pay.

When I was young and considered myself a pacifist (I’ve grown up since then) there was a classic question I kept getting tossed into my face: “What if you’re sitting behind a machine gun and enemy soldiers are charging. Do you shoot or not?”

It took me years to finally come up with an answer: if a pacifist finds himself in such a strange situation, then he has ALREADY committed a deeply unethical act sometime in the past, and there is no longer any “right” way out.

That’s the same situation with your question. My answer to your first question is “C. There should not be an NHS.”

My answer to your second question is “C. If there is no NHS then your question is moot.”

And it’s really unlikely he could get up to cook it. 2nd question: who was feeding him? You obviously aren’t a libertarian. He never could have become that fat without help.

For the second, 2C – I’d counter-sue him for the costs he ran up for his care.

Who, exactly, was paying for the food he was eating? Dig a bit. The man was on the dole.

As an English law student, I don’t think the lawsuit will succeed – I don’t think you can say that scheduling a surgery and then delaying it would be considered a voluntary assumption of responsibility, and in any case there’s a strong argument that he is entirely the author of his own misfortune and that his acts would therefore be a novus actus interveniens. I can’t be bothered to look up precedents to see if there has ever been a case where the NHS delaying surgery has been found to be actionable negligence; nor whether the other demands on the NHS’s budget would mean that they acted reasonably (hence no breach). But, in the absence of a contract or positive misfeasance, I don’t think mere nonfeasance should be actionable.