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Notes -
On the other hand, consequences removed also remove any incentive to stop doing stupid things. Maybe cutting funds to treat active disease is a bad idea, but I do think that much more of the burden for these kinds of lifestyle diseases (not just promiscuous sexual activity, but obesity, drug use, smoking, and high risk trill seeking) that add burdens to the public, and often not nearly as much for the person who brought the problems on themselves. If they were to see others like themselves forced to pay for treatment after a lifetime of risky behavior catches up to them, they’d likely take at least some warning. It’s much like what’s happened in the student loan crisis— more and more kids are choosing options other than college because they see how much trouble their older siblings and parents got themselves in by going to college without a solid plan. If we’d actually managed to forgive the loans, that would not happen. And I think the same might well work to a degree for lifestyle choices that cause disease or injury— if you had to spend yourself into poverty undoing the damage of I.e. obesity, then a lot of people would look at people having to do that because they couldn’t put down their forks and decide to download a weight-loss app and control their eating and exercise plan. If they see their future as “I’ll just get free ozempic at taxpayer expense when it gets bad enough,” tge lack of negative consequences give them no reason to avoid the problem or take positive steps to fix it.
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