Winter Fuel Payment: Austerity and Preventable Deaths
You couldn’t make it up. Means testing the Winter Fuel Payment risks taking money out of the threadbare pockets of the most vulnerable in our society. Even those with an annual income of less than £13500 will be hit. Single pensioners will be particularly hit. Yet, the government did not carry out an assessment of the likely impact on mortality on the proposed cuts to the payment.
We have a 22 billion black hole. But trying to fill it by cutting the Winter Fuel Payment risks causing excess winter deaths. In 1923, “In the long run we are all dead,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in A Tract on Monetary Reform. This does not mean that the elderly should fall before their time. As the 19th century English surgeon Thomas Inman said, “First, do no harm.”
Much in the same way as we have an Office of Budget Responsibility we should have an office of health responsibility to give us estimates of the impacts of all major government policies on preventable death and sickness.
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